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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



A NORTHERN 
COUNTRYSIDE 



By 
ROSALIND RICHARDS 



Illustrated from photographs 

by 

BERTRAND H. WENTWORTH 




NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
1916 






Copyright, 1916 

BY 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 



Published April, 1916 




THE QUINN Ic BODEN CO. PRESS 
RAHWAr, N. J. 



APR 19 iy!6 



'CI,A428593 



^0 

J. R., L. E. W., and L. T. S., 

without whose help this small record could not 
have been written. 



PREFACE 

No one person can fitly describe a neighbor- 
hood, no matter how long known, how well 
loved. Yet records of what is lovely and of 
good report in a district should be treasured 
and preserved, however imperfectly. 

My father's name, not mine, should rightly 
be signed to these pages, for it is his intimate 
knowledge of our countryside, loved and ex- 
plored with a boy's ardor and a naturalist's 
insight since childhood, which they strive to 
set down. 

I have taken care to write almost wholly 
of two or more generations ago, and of per- 
sons who, with few exceptions, have now 
passed out of this life; and I have in all cases 
altered names, and shifted families from one 
part of the county to another, to avoid pos- 
sible annoyance to surviving connections. It 
has even seemed best in some cases — though 
I have done so with reluctance — to change the 
names of villages, of hills and streams, as 
well. 

V 



vi PREFACE 

Beyond this, I have striven only to record 
faithfully the anecdotes and memories that 
have come down to me. But no record, how- 
ever faithful, can be in any way adequate. 
The rays will be refracted by the medium of 
the writer's personality; and the best that can 
be done will be but a small mirrored frag- 
ment, before the daily repeated miracle of 
the living reality. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 




PAGE 




PREFACE 


V 


I 


A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE . 


3 


II 


THE RIVER 


12 


III 


THE BANKS OF THE RIVER 


25 


IV 


THE CAPTAI NS . . . 


40 


V 


BY THE ACUSHTICOOK 


53 


VI 


SPRING 


63 


VII 


THE EASTMAN HILL CROSS- 






ROAD 


72 


VIII 


RIDGEFIELD, AND W E I R ' S 






MILLS 


82 


IX 


MARY GUILFOYLE 


94 


X 


TRESUMPSCOTT POND 


103 


XI 


IN THE TRESUMPSCOTT 






WOODS 


112 


XII 


HARVEST 


131 


XIII 


WATSON'S HILL. 


141 


XIV 


EARLY WINTER .... 


157 


XV 


A S S I M A S Q U A , AND M A R S T N . 


171 


XVI 


OURTOWN 


188 



Thanks are due Mr. Bertrand H. Wentworth of 
Gardiner, Maine, for his very kind permission to illus- 
trate this book with reproductions of his photographs. 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

ON THE EASTMAN HILL CROSS-ROAD Frontispiece "^ 

FACING 
PAGE 

THE WOODS JUT OUT IN ISLANDS ROUND AN 

OUTCROPPING LEDGE 6 

INTERVALE ALONG THE RIVER's COURSE . 56' 

THE SOUTH WIND IN MARCH . . . 64^ 

THE PEACEFUL, PRETTY HAMLET OF UPPER 

BRIDGE 88' 

PLOUGHING MARY's FIELD . . . . 96^ 

ON TRESUMPSCOTT POND .... IO3 

THE TRANQUIL WOODS COVER THE RISE AND 

FALL OF THE RIDGES .... 121 

THE CORN WAS STANDING AMONG THE 
GOLDEN PUMPKINS IN STACKS THAT 
LOOKED LIKE HUDDLED WITCHES . . I38 

LONGFELLOW POND LIES IN THE HOLLOW 

OF THE WOODS 1 54 

ICE-CUTTING ON THE RIVER BEGINS IN JAN- 
UARY 162 

THE WIND CARVES OUT WAVE-LIKE SHAPES 

OF DRIFT 181 



A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 



CHAPTER I 
A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

Our county lies in a northern State, in 
the midst of one of those districts known 
geographically as " regions of innumerable 
lakes." It is in good part wooded — hilly, 
irregular country, not mountainous, but often 
bold and marked in outline. Save for its 
lakes, strangers might pass through it with- 
out especial notice; but its broken hills have 
a peculiar intimacy and lovableness, and to 
us it is so beautiful that new wonder falls on 
us year after year as we dwell in it. 

There is a marked trend of the land. I 
suppose the first landmark a bird would dis- 
tinguish in its flight would be our long, 
round-shouldered ridges, running north and 
south. Driving across country, either east- 
ward or westward, you go up and up in 
leisurely rises, with plenty of fairly level 
resting places between, up long calm shoulder 
after shoulder, to the Height of Land. And 



4 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

there you take breath of wonder, for lo, be- 
fore you and below you, behold a whole new 
countryside framed by new hills. 

Sometimes the lower country thus revealed 
is in its turn broken into lesser hills, or 
moulded into noble rounding valleys. Some- 
times there are stretches of intervale or old 
lake bottom, of real flat-land, a rare beauty 
with us, on which the eyes rest with delight. 
More often than not there is shining water, 
lake or pond or stream. Sometimes this lower 
valley country extends for miles before the 
next range rises, so that your glance travels 
restfully out over the wide spaces. Sometimes 
it is little, like a cup. 

As you get up towards the Height of Land 
you come to what makes the returning New 
Englander draw breath quickly, the pleasure 
is so poignant: upland pastures dotted with 
juniper and boulders, and broken by clumps 
of balsam fir and spruce. Most fragrant, most 
beloved places. Dicksonia fern grows thick 
about the boulders. The pasturage is thin 
June-grass, the color of beach sand, as it ripens, 
and in August this is transformed to a queen's 
garden by the blossoming of blue asters and 



A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 5 

the little nemoralis golden-rod, which grew 
unnoticed all the earlier summer. Often 
whole stretches of the slope are carpeted with 
mayflowers and checkerberries, and as you 
climb higher, and meet the wind from the 
other side of the ridge, your foot crunches on 
gray reindeer-moss. 

Last week, before climbing a small bare- 
peaked mountain, I turned aside to explore a 
path which led through a field of scattered 
balsam firs, with lady-fern growing thick 
about their feet. A little further on, the firs 
were assembled in groups and clumps, and 
then group was joined to group. The valley 
grew deeper and darker, and still the same 
small path led on, till I found myself in the 
tallest and most solemn wood of firs that I have 
ever seen. They were sixty feet high, needle- 
pointed, black, and they filled the long hollow 
between the hills, like a dark river. 

The woods alternate with fields to clothe 
the hills and intervales and valleys, and make 
a constant and lovely variety over the land- 
scape. Sometimes they seem a shore instead 
of a river. They jut out into the meadow- 
land, in capes and promontories, and stand 



6 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

in little islands, clustered round an outcrop- 
ping ledge or a boulder too big to be re- 
moved. You are confronted everywhere with 
this meeting of the natural and indented shore 
of the woods, close, feathery, impenetrable, 
with the bays and inlets of fi'eld and pasture 
and meadow. The jutting portions are apt 
to be made more sharp and marked by the 
most striking part of our growth, the ever- 
greens. There they grow, white pine and 
red pine, black spruce, hemlock, and balsam 
fir, in lovely sisterhood. Their needles shine 
in the sun. They taper perfectly, finished at 
every point, clean, dry, and resinous; and the 
fragrance distilled from them by our crystal 
air is as surely the very breath of New Eng- 
land as that of the Spice Islands is the breath 
of the East. 

Our soil is often spoken of as barren, but 
this is only where it has been neglected. Hay 
and apples give us abundant crops; indeed our 
apples have made a name at home and 
abroad. Potatoes also give us a very fine 
yield, and a great part of the State is rich 
in lumber. When it is left to itself, the 
land reverts to wave after wave of luxuriant 



A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 7 

pine forest. Forty miles east of us they are 
cutting out masts again where the Constitu- 
tion s masts were cut. 

The apple orchards are scattered over the 
slopes. In the more upland places, sheep are 
kept, and the sheep-pastures are often 
hill-side orchards of tall sugar maples. 
We have neat fields of oats and barley, more 
or less scattered, and once in a while a buck- 
wheat patch, while every farm has a good 
cornfield, beans, pumpkins, and potatoes, be- 
sides " the woman's " little patch of " garden 
truck." A good many bees are kept, in 
colonies of gray hives under the apple 
trees. 

The people who live on the farms are, I 
suppose, much like farm people everywhere. 
" Folks are folks "; yet, after being much with 
them, certain qualities impress themselves 
upon one's notice as characteristic; they have 
a dry sense of humor, and quaint and whim- 
sical ways of expressing it, and with this, a 
refinement of thought and speech that is al- 
most fastidious; a fine reticence about the 
physical aspects of life such as is only found, 
I believe, in a strong race, a people drawing 



8 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

their vigor from deep and untainted springs. 
I often wonder whether there is another 
place in the world where women are shel- 
tered from any possible coarseness of expres- 
sion with such considerate delicacy as they 
find among the rough men on a New England 
farm. • 

The life is so hard, the hours so neces- 
sarily long, in our harsh climate, that small- 
natured persons too often become little 
more than machines. They get through their 
work, and they save every penny they can; 
and that is all. The Granges, however, are 
increasing a pleasant and wholesome social 
element which is beyond price, and all winter 
you meet sleighs full of rosy-cheeked families, 
driving to the Hall for Grange Meeting, or 
Sunday Meeting, or for the weekly dance. 

Many of the farm people are large-minded 
enough to do their work well, and still keep 
above and on top of it; and some of these 
stand up in a sort of splendor. Their fibres 
have been seasoned in a life that calls for 
all a man's powers. Their grave kind faces 
show that, living all their lives in one place, 
they have taken the longest of ail journeys, 



A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 9 

and traveled deep into the un-map-able coun- 
try of Life. I do not know how to write 
fittingly of some of these older farm people; 
wise enough to be simple, and deep-rooted as 
the trees that grow round them; so strong 
and attuned to their work that the burdens 
of others grow light in their presence, and 
life takes on its right and happier propor- 
tions when one is with them. 

If the first impression of our country is 
its uniformity, the second and amazing one 
is its surprises, its secret places. The long 
ridges accentuate themselves suddenly into 
sharp slopes and steep cup-shaped valleys, 
covered with sweet-fern and juniper. The 
wooded hills are often full of hidden cliffs 
(rich gardens in themselves, they are so 
deep in ferns and moss), and quick brooks run 
through them, so that you are never long 
without the talk of one to keep you company. 
There are rocky glens, where you meet cold, 
sweet air, the ceaseless comforting of a 
waterfall, and moss on moss, to velvet depths 
of green. 

The ridges rise and slope and rise again 
with general likeness, but two of them open 



lo A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

amazingly to disclose the wide blue surface of 
our great River. We are rich in rivers, and 
never have to journey far to reach one, but 
I never can get quite used to the surprise of 
coming among the hills on this broad strong 
full-running stream, with gulls circling 
over it. 

One thing sets us apart from other regions: 
our wonderful lakes. They lie all around us, 
so that from every hill-top you see their 
shining and gleaming. It is as if the worn 
mirror of the glacier had been splintered into 
a thousand shining fragments, and the com- 
mon saying is that our State is more than 
half water. They are so many that we call 
them ponds, not lakes, whether they are two 
miles long, or ten, or twenty.* I have counted 
over nine hundred on the State map, and then 
given up counting. No one person could ever 
know them all; there still would be new " Lost 
Ponds " and " New Found Lakes." 

The greater part of them lie in the un- 
broken woods, but countless numbers are in 

* The legal distinction in our State is not between ponds and lakes, 
but between ponds and "Great Ponds." All land-locked waters 
over ten acres in area are Great Ponds ; in which the public have 
rights of fishing, ice-cutting, etc. 



A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE ii 

open farming country. They run from great 
sunlit sheets with many islands to the most 
perfect tiny hidden forest jewels, places 
utterly lonely and apart, mirroring only the 
depths of the green woods. 

Each " pond," large or little, is a world in it- 
self. You can almost believe that the moon 
looks down on each with different radiance, 
that the south wind has a special fragrance 
as it blows across each; and each one has 
some peculiar, intimate beauty; deep bays, 
lovely and secluded channels between wooded 
islands, or small curved beaches which shine 
between dark headlands, lit up now and then 
by a camp fire. 

Hill after hill, round-shouldered ridge after 
ridge; low nearer the salt water, increasing 
very gradually in height till they form the 
wild amphitheatre of blue peaks in the north- 
ern part of the State ; partly farming country, 
and greater part wooded; this is our country- 
side, and across it and in and out of the 
forests its countless lovely lakes shine and its 
great rivers thread their tranquil way to the 
sea. 



CHAPTER II 
THE RIVER 

Our river is one of the pair of kingly 
streams which traverse ahiiost our entire State 
from north to south. The first tv^enty-five 
miles of its course, after leaving the great 
lake which it drains, is a tearing rapid be- 
tween rocky walls: then follows perhaps a 
hundred miles of alternating falls and " dead 
water," the falls being now fast taken up 
as water powers. It has eleven hundred feet 
to fall to reach the sea, and it does most of 
this in its first thirty miles. 

The river's course through part of our 
county is marked by a noticeable geological 
formation. For a space of fifteen miles, the 
greater and lesser tributary streams have 
broken their way down through the western 
ridge of the river valley in a succession of 
small chasms that are so many true mountain 
defiles in little. They have the sharp de- 
scents and extreme variety of slopes and 



THE RIVER 13 

counter-slopes, though with walls never more 
than a hundred and fifty feet high. 

There are forty or fifty of these ravines, 
some nourishing strong brooks, some a mere 
trickle, or a stream of green marsh and 
ferns where water once ran. Acushticook, 
which threads the largest, is really a river, and 
Rollingdam, Bombahook, and Worromonto- 
gus are all powerful streams. Rollingdam 
follows a very private course, hidden in deep 
mossy woods for several miles. The ravine 
presently deepens and becomes more marked^ 
descending in abrupt slopes, then narrows to 
a gorge, the rocky sides of which are covered 
with moss and ferns, nourished by spray. 
The brook runs through it in two or three 
short cascades, and falls sheer and white to a 
pool, twelve feet below. 

Below our Town, the river sweeps on, 
steadily wider and nobler in expanse, till it 
reaches the place where five other rivers pour 
their streams into its waters, and it broadens 
into the sheet of Merrymeeting Bay, three 
miles from shore to shore. 

Below the bay the channel narrows almost 
to a gorge. The sides are steep and rocky, 



14 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

crowned with black growth of fir and 
spruce, and through this space the swollen 
waters pour in great force. There are strong 
tide races, in which the river steamers reel and 
tremble, and below this there begins a perfect 
labyrinth of channels, some mere backwaters, 
some leading through intricate passages 
among a hundred fairy islands. There are 
cliffs, moss and fern-grown, and countless 
dark headlands. The islands are heavily 
wooded with characteristic evergreen growth, 
dense, fragrant, of a rich color, and they are 
ringed with cream-white granite above the 
sea-weed, where the blue water circles them. 

And so down, till the first break of blue 

sea shows between the spruces. 

We never feel cut off, or too far inland, 
having our river. The actual sea fog reaches 
us on a south wind, salt to the lips. Gulls 
come up all the way from the sea, and save 
for the winter months, there is hardly a day 
when you do not see four or five of them 
wheeling and circling; while twice or thrice 
in a lifetime a gale brings us Mother Carey's 
chickens, scudding low, or else worn out and 
resting after the storm. 



THE RIVER 15 

The river sleeps all winter under its white 
covering, but great cracks go ringing and re- 
sounding up stream as the tide makes or 
ebbs, leaping half a mile to a note, to tell 
of the life that is pulsing beneath; and be- 
fore the snow comes, you can watch, through 
the black ice, the drift stuff move quietly 
beneath your feet with the tide as you skate. 
I have read fine print through two feet of 
ice, from a bit of newspaper carried along 
below by the current. One winter a dovekie 
lived for three weeks by a small open space 
made by the eddy near some ledges; then a 
hard freeze came, and the poor thing broke its 
neck, diving at the round black space of ice 
which looked scarcely different from the same 
space of open water. 

The river lies frozen for at least four 
months. The ice weakens with the March 
thaws and rains. Then comes a night in 
April when the forces which move the moun- 
tains are at work, and in the morning, lo, 
the chains are broken. The great stream 
runs swift and brown and the ice cakes 
crowd and jostle each other as they spin 
past. 



i6 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

The river traffic goes steadily on through 
our three open seasons, and with it a little 
of the longer perspective of all sea-faring 
life comes to us, and off-sets the day-in-day- 
out of the town's shop and factory routine. 

Our southern lumber is brought us by 
handsome three and four-masted schooners, 
which take northern lumber and ice on the 
return voyage. The other day two schooners, 
on their maiden voyage, white and trim as 
yachts, were at the lumber wharf, the Break 
of Day and the Herald of the Morning. 

Our coal comes in the usual long ugly 
barges. One or two small excursion steamers 
connect us with the nearer coast towns, forty 
miles distant, and every day all summer, the 
one large passenger steamer which connects 
us with the big coast cities, comes to or from 
our town. She takes her tranquil way be- 
tween the river hills, not without majesty, 
while the water draws back from the shores 
as she passes and the high banks reverberate 
to the peaceful thunder of her paddles. Like 
other river towns, we have now a fleet of 
motor boats, in use for pleasure and small 
fishing. 



THE RIVER 17 

Traffic on the river shrank immensely with 
the forming of the Ice Trust, which holds 
our ice-fields now only as a reserve. We see 
three or four tall schooners at a time now, 
where we used to count the riding lights of a 
dozen at anchor in the channel. 

The greater part of our fleet of tugs is scat- 
tered. The Resolute and Adelia, — dear me, 
even their names are like old friends — the 
Clara Clarita, the City of Lynn, the Knicker- 
bocker, and the trim smart twin tugs, Charlie 
Lawrence and Stella, have gone to other 
waters. The Ice-King plies now in the coast- 
wise trade. Our lessened river work is done 
by the Seguin, a large and handsome boat, the 
Ariel, a T-wharf tug from Boston, and the 
Sarah J. Green, an ugly boat with a smoke- 
stack too tall for her. 

The Government boat comes up in late April, 
while the river is still very rapid, brown and 
swirling after the spring freshet, and sets the 
channel buoys. We always thrill a little at 
her unwonted, sea-sounding whistle. She 
comes again in November, takes up the buoys, 
and carries them to some strange buoy pad- 
dock in one of the winter harbors, where hun- 



1 8 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

dreds and hundreds of them are stacked and re- 
painted. The names of the revenue cutters in 
this service are prettily chosen, the Lilac, 
Geranium, etc. 

Before the days of tugs, schooners and 
larger vessels sailed up and dov^n the thirty- 
odd navigable miles of our river under their 
ovi^n canvas, and the traffic to and from At- 
lantic ports was carried on by packets: brigs, 
schooners, and topsail schooners. One of the 
captains has told me that, seventy-five years 
ago, on his first voyage, it took his brig seven 
days to beat to the mouth of the river, a 
passage now made in six hours. It must 
have been extremely difficult piloting. The 
channel is narrow in many places, though the 
river itself is so wide. There are sand-bars, 
mud-flats, and ledges. 

In my Father's childhood a curious, in- 
deed a unique type of vessel, known as a 
Waterville Sloop, plied between what was 
then (before the building of the dams), the 
head of navigation, twenty-six miles above 
us, and Boston, taking lumber and hay. They 
carried one square-rigged mast, and sailed 
with lee-boards, like the Dutch galliots, and 



THE RIVER 19 

were in fact a survival of the square-rigged 
sloops of old time, immortal in the memories 
of the glorious Sloops of War, and in Tur- 
ner's pictures. 

Once in a while you still see '* pinkies," 
which were once so common: small schooner- 
rigged vessels with a " pink " (probably 
originally a pinked) stern, i.e., a stern rising 
to a point, with a crotch to rest the boom in. 

Scows are rarer than they used to be, but 
they still carry on their humble, casual lumber 
and hay business, sailing up with the flood- 
tide, and tying up for the ebb. They are 
sloop-rigged, quite smart-looking under sail, 
and sail with lee-boards, like the Waterville 
Sloops. 

The Lobster Smack, a tiny two-masted 
schooner, not more than thirty feet long, 
comes once a week in the season, and we buy 
our lobsters on the wharf and carry them 
home all sprawling, and are delighted when 
we get a little sea-weed with them. 

The laborers of the river are the dredges, 
pile-drivers, and their kind. They must see 
to the journeyman's work that keeps the 
river's traffic unhampered. They drive piers 



20 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

and jetties and dredge out sand-bars. They 
go and come, unnoticed by smarter vessels, 
laden heavily with broken stone, sand, or 
gravel. They are dingy pov^erful boats, fitted 
with a derrick and hoist or other machinery. 
They carry big rope buffers at bow and sides, 
and in spite of this their bulwarks are splin- 
tered and scarred where they have been 
jammed against wharves and knocked about. 
There is no fresh paint or bright brass about 
them, they are grimy citizens, but are all 
strong and seaworthy. Sometimes the Cap- 
tain is also owner; sometimes one man owns 
a whole little fleet, of two dredges, say, and a 
small tug, named perhaps after wife and 
daughters, as in one case I know, the Nellie, 
Sophia, and Doris. This is the family ven- 
ture, followed with as much anxious pride in 
" our Vessels " as if the fleet were Cunarders. 
One day what should come up the river 
but a white schooner, tapering and tall, and 
glistening with new masts and cordage, bear- 
ing a fairy cargo of shells and corals. The 
rare shells, some of them costly museum 
pieces, were to be sold to collectors, if any 
were to be found along our northern harbors, 



THE RIVER 21 

while others, as beautiful as flowers or sunset 
clouds, the children might have for a few 
pennies. 

The Captain was a young Spaniard, very- 
dark, and as handsome, grave, and simple in 
bearing, as a Spanish Captain should be. 
His men seemed to adore him, and to obey 
the turn of his eyelashes. They all gave us 
a charming welcome, especially to the chil- 
dren. It was a leisurely and pleasant little 
venture. I do not know whether it brought 
in profit, but all the town flocked to the 
schooner, day after day, for the week that 
she stayed with us. 

The rafts come down the river when they 
please. They look about as easy to manoeuvre 
as an ice-house, but the flannel-shirted lum- 
bermen who operate them, two to a raft, 
seem unconcerned, and scull away at their long 
" sweeps," in the apparently hopeless task 
of keeping their clumsy craft ofif the shal- 
lows. With the breaking up of the ice, stray 
logs, escaped from the holding booms, come 
down stream. The moment the ice-cakes are 
out of the river, even before, you begin to 
notice shabby old row-boats tied up and 



22 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

waiting at the mouth of every stream and 
"guzzle"; and as soon as a log whirls down 
amongst the confusion of ice, you will see 
boats put out, perhaps with a couple of boys, 
or else some old humped-up fellow, in a coat 
green with age, rowing cross-handed, nosing 
out like an old pickerel watching for min- 
nows. The logs that are missed drift about 
till they are water-logged, when they sink 
little by little, and at last become what are 
known as " tide-waiters," or " tide-rollers," 
i.e. snags drifting above, or resting partly on, 
the bottom, a menace to vessels. 

There are holding booms at different turns 
of the river, with odd shabby little house-boats 
for the rafts-men moored beside them; and 
what are these called but gundalows, an old, 
old " Down-east " corruption of gondola; 
whether in derision, or in ignorance, is 
not now known. Sometimes they are fitted 
up with some coziness, perhaps with 
white curtains and a little fresh paint, 
and I have even seen geraniums at their 
windows. 

Another brand-new schooner, the William 
D'Arcy, tied up at our lumber wharf this last 



THE RIVER 23 

spring, and lay there for nearly a week. We 
all went on board her. She lay at the shel- 
tered side of the wharf, out of the cold wind, 
and the sun poured down on her. The smell 
of salt and cordage was so strong that you 
could almost feel the lift of her bows to the 
swell, but there she lay, as quiet as if she had 
never lifted to a wave at all. The men were at 
work at various jobs; no one was in a hurry; 
it plainly made no difference whether they 
were two days at the wharf or ten. 

The bulwarks and outside fittings, anchors, 
hawsers, and hawse-holes, seemed wonderfully 
large to our landsman eyes, and the inside 
fi.ttings, lockers, etc., as wonderfully small 
and compact. The enormous masts were of 
new yellow Oregon pine. 

The Captain welcomed us hospitably, and 
took us down into his cabin, which was fitted 
with shelves, lockers, and cupboards, neat and 
compact, all brand-new and shining with var- 
nish. There was a shelf of books, the table 
had a red cover and reading lamp, and the 
wife's work-basket stood on it, with some 
mending. She had gone " upstreet " for her 
marketing. 



24 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

" Oh," said one of us, " it looks so home- 
like and cozy! " 

The Captain looked round it complacently, 
but with remembering eyes that spoke of 
many things. He had been cruising all 
winter. 

" It looks so to you," he said, " but often 
it ain't." 



CHAPTER III 
THE BANKS OF THE RIVER 

The river-bank boys pick up, as easily as 
they breathe, knowledge as miscellaneous as 
the drift piled on the shores. They know all 
the shoals and principal eddies, without the 
aid of buoys. They know the ways and 
seasons of the different fish. They learn to 
recognize the owner's marks on the logs, and 
they know the times and ways of all the 
humbler as well as the larger river craft, the 
scows and smacks, and the " gundalows " 
which spend mysterious month after month 
hauled up among the sedges at the mouths 
of the streams. Their own row-boats are 
heavy, square at both ends, and clumsy to 
row, but as I have said, they are out in them 
in the spring before the floating ice is out of 
the river, rescuing logs and fragments of lum- 
ber from between the ice-cakes. 

There is a good deal to the business of 
picking up logs. The price for returning 

25 



26 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

" strays " to the right owners is ten cents a 
log (the rate increasing as you go down 
stream), and a good many can be towed at 
once by a small boat. The price per log rises 
to twenty-five cents, near the sea. In times 
of high freshet, the up-river booms often 
break, and then there is a tremendous to-do at 
the mouth of the river: men, women, and 
children, all who can handle or half-handle a 
dory, are at work at log-rescuing. Incoming 
ships have found the surface of the ocean 
brown with logs at these times, and have a 
great work to get through them. 

Logs that have lost their marks are called 
" scalawags," and these are sold for the bene- 
fit of the log-driving company. Hollow- 
hearted pine logs are known by the curious 
term " concussy," or " conquassy." To show 
the immense change in the prices of lumber, 
the best pine lumber, which in 1870 was 
worth ten dollars a thousand feet, is now one 
hundred dollars a thousand. 

Now and then a boy takes to the river so 
strongly that he makes his life work out of 
its teachings. The captains and engineers 
of most of our river and harbor steamers, 



THE BANKS OF THE RIVER 27 

and of bigger craft, too, began life as river- 
bank boys. Some of them take to fishing in 
earnest, some become lumbermen, or go into 
the Coast-Survey service, or the Rivers and 
Harbors; and the winter work on the ice 
leads to an interesting life for a good many 
others. Once in a while one of these boys goes 
far from home. We have had word of one and 
another, serving as pilot or engineer in Japa- 
nese, Brazilian, and East Indian waters. 

The three Tucker brothers, Joel, Reuel, and 
Amos, three finely-built men, all worked up to 
be registered pilots. Joel, the eldest, was 
pilot of an ocean-going steamer all his life. 
He grew very stout, and had a fine nautical 
presence, in blue cloth and brass buttons. 
Reuel was lazy. He never went higher than 
small raft-towing tugs, and he often gave 
up his work and loafed about, fishing. He 
was the man who swam five miles down 
river, and stopped then because he was 
bored, not because he was tired. Amos, the 
finest of them, a gallant looking fellow, with 
very bright blue eyes, was a pilot for a good 
many years, and then a foreman in the ice 
business. He was a man of such shining 



28 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

kindness that he was always up to the han- 
dle in work in the heart of his town, as 
selectman, honorary and volunteer overseer of 
the poor, and helper-out in general. In a 
case of all-night nursing, in a poor family, 
where a man's strength was needed, Amos 
was on hand, rubbing his eyes, but watchful 
and ready. Once, when a neighbor's wife 
had to be taken to the Insane Hospital, Amos 
undertook the sad task, and his gentleness 
made it just bearable. Parents looked to 
him for help in the care of a bad or unruly 
boy. 

Then there were the Tracys, who ran — 
and still run — a queer little ferry at Jones- 
town, " according to seasons." When the 
ice begins to break up they row the passen- 
gers across, somehow, in a heavy flat-boat, 
between the ice cakes. Their regular boat, 
in which they embark wagons and even a 
motor, is a large scow pulled across by a 
chain, with a sail to help when the wind 
serves. The Tracys' ferry is, I think, unique 
for one regulation; man and wife go as one 
fare. 

Some of the river bank people are mere 



THE BANKS OF THE RIVER 29 

squatters. The squatter, as we called him, par 
excellence, pulled the logs and bits for his 
dwelling actually out of the river, as a musk- 
rat collects bits of drift for his house. He 
was a Frenchman, and such a house as he 
built! Part tar-paper, part bark, part clay 
bank, the rest logs, barrel-staves, and a few 
railroad sleepers. But there he lived, on a 
tiny level plot under the railroad bank, so 
near the river that each spring freshet threat- 
ened entire destruction. He made or acquired 
a boat that matched his house, and presently 
he brought not only his wife and children, 
but two brothers and an old mother to live 
with him. The women contrived some tiny 
garden patches on the slopes of the river 
bank, and with the rich silt of the stream 
these throve wonderfully. The men fished, 
and " odd-jobbed " about. 

Then came the Great Freshet. Dear me! 
shall we ever forget it? We woke one March 
night to hear every bell in town ringing, 
while a long ominous whistle repeated the 
terrifying signal of the freshet alarm. 

There was a confusion of sounds from the 
river, wild crashings and grindings and 



30 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

thunders, as the ice broke up in its full 
strength, with a noise almost like can- 
non. 

The water rose and rose. By daybreak it 
was up to the shop-counters in the street, 
and people paddled in and out of the shops 
in canoes, rescuing their goods. The ice- 
cakes were piled ten feet high on our un- 
fortunate railroad. Then a great holding- 
boom broke, a mile up river. A twenty-foot 
wall of logs swept round the bend, and the 
watchers on the roofs and raised platforms 
saw it splinter and carry out the Town 
Bridge as if it had been kindlings. 

Sheds and boat-houses and wharfing were 
whirled past all day in the tumble of ice 
cakes. Like other people in danger, the 
Squatter carried out his gipsy household 
goods, and moved up town with his family; 
all but the old French mother. She would 
not be moved, but sat in the middle of the 
road on a backless chair, watching her dwell- 
ing. She could have done nothing to save 
it, but nothing could tear her away. The 
rain poured all that day and the next. Some 
one lent her a big broken umbrella, and there 



THE BANKS OF THE RIVER 31 

she sat. I could think of nothing but a for- 
lorn old eaves swallow, watching the place 
where her mud dwelling was being torn 
off. 

By some miracle of the eddy, however, the 
house stayed intact; but soon after they all 
moved away, to safer, and, I believe, more 
comfortable quarters. 

The Lamont family lived a mile north of 
the Town. They had a ramshackle house and 
barn, in a bit of open meadow by the mouth 
of one of the brooks. You might say of the 
Lamonts that they were so steeped in river 
mud that every bone of them was lazy and 
easy and slack. There were the father and 
mother, and seven children. They were as 
unkempt and ragged as could be, but they 
always seemed cheerful and smiling, and the 
younger children were fat as little dumplings. 
The three eldest were shambling young men; 
they and the father seemed perfectly con- 
tent with a little fishing and odd-jobbing, 
and now and then one of them took a turn 
as deck-hand or stevedore, or — as a last 
resort — as farm-hand. The girls and the 
mother dug and sold dandelion greens, dock, 



32 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

and thoroughwort and other old-fashioned 
simples. 

None of them had ever gone to school a 
day beyond the time required by law, and 
they kept the truant officer busy at that; 
then all of a sudden the youngest and fattest 
Lamont, whose incongruous name was Her- 
naldo, appeared at the High School. He 
was an imperturbable child, and quite dull, 
but he worked with a cheerful slow patience. 
He only held on for a year, but no one had 
imagined he could keep on for so long, and 
he did not do badly. 

The elders died before the younger chil- 
dren were quite grown, and the family scat- 
tered; one night, after it had been empty a 
year or two, the ramshackle house burned, 
leaving the barn standing. 

One morning about ten years afterwards a 
radiant being appeared at the High School, 
a fat young man in frock coat and tall hat, 
who came forward and shook hands effu- 
sively. It was Hernaldo Lamont! He was 
now chef, it appeared, at one of the great 
California hotels through the winters, and in 
Vancouver in summer, at a very large salary. 



THE BANKS OF THE RIVER 33 

A pretty girl, charmingly dressed, whom he 
introduced as his wife, waited modestly at the 
door. 

His clothes were quite wonderful. He was 
shining with soap and with fashion, and so 
full of warmth and of pleasure. He brought 
out colored photographs of his two fat little 
children, told of his stafif and his patrons, 
beamed upon everyone, and showed his pretty 
wife all about our plain High School, ad- 
miring and reverent. I think that if it had 
been Oxford he could not have been prouder, 
and indeed Oxford could never be to the 
average student a place of higher achieve- 
ment than High School to a Lamont! 

He was so simple and kindly that I be- 
lieve he would have taken his wife to the 
Lamont shanty as happily. The Lamont 
barn is still standing, grown up with tall 
nettles and dandelions. A farmer uses it for 
his extra hay, mowed in the low rich patches 
of river meadow. Tramps sleep in the hay, 
and quantities of barn-swallows flash in and 
out of the empty windows. 

Long ago our River was one of the great 
salmon streams of the country. In my 



34 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

great grandfather's time agreements between 
apprentices and servants, and their em- 
ployers, held the stipulation that the em- 
ployees should not have to eat salmon above 
five times m the week; and the fish were used 
for fertilizing the fields. There are none now 
at all, and the sturgeon fishing, which in my 
father's boyhood used to make summer nights 
on the River a time of torchlit adventure, is 
over too, though still late on a summer 
afternoon you may see now and then a 
silver flash, and hear a crash, as the huge 
creature jumps; and only last week two stur- 
geon of over eight hundred pounds weight 
each were brought in right near the Town 
Bridge. They were caught by two hard- 
working lads, and brought them a little for- 
tune, for they were sold in New York for 
over $250. 

Not even the flight of the birds from the 
south, unbelievable in wonder as this is, is 
more miraculous than the run of the fish, 
from the vast spaces of ocean up all our 
fresh-water streams for hundreds of miles. 
Their bright thousands find their way un- 
erringly, up into the heart of the country. 



THE BANKS OF THE RIVER 35 

No one knows whence they come, and save 
for an occasional straggler, no one has ever 
taken salmon or shad or ale-wife in deep 
water. We know their passage up-stream, 
but no one knows when they take their way 
down again. 

The smelts run up, when winter is still at 
its height. They are caught through holes 
in the ice. The men build huts of boards or 
of boughs, each round his own smelt hole. 
They build a fire on the ice, or have a kero- 
sene lantern or lamp, and fish thus all day in 
fair comfort. They catch smelts by thou- 
sands, so that our town's people, who can 
eat them not two hours out of the water, are 
spoiled for the smelts which are called fresh 
in cities. Tom-cod come up a little ahead 
of the smelts. 

Soon after the ice goes out, while the water 
is still very rapid and turgid, the alewives 
run up, and they are as good eating as smelts, 
though too full of bones. They are smoked 
slightly, but not salted. About this time, too, 
the smaller boys begin catching yellow-perch 
at the mouths of the brooks. These, and tom- 
cod, are not thought worth putting on the 



36 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

market, but they are crisp little fish, and a 
string of them, thirteen for twelve cents, 
makes a good supper.* 

Suckers also come with the opening of 
the brooks. The discovery has been made 
lately, that these fish, which New Englanders 
despise (quite wrongly, for if well cooked 
they are firm and good), are prized by the 
Jewish population of some of the bigger 
cities, and bring a good price. A ton and a 
half of suckers were shipped from our river 
this season. 

Our royal fish are the shad, which arrive in 
the middle of May, when the woods are all 
blossoming. The May river is full of their 
great silvery squadrons. They are caught at 
night, in drift nets, by hundreds. Most of 
them are shipped away, but our Town must 
and does eat as many as possible. One 
family, who know what they like, practically 
abjure all other solid food for the shad 
season! 

Of all our fish, eels are the most myste- 
rious; for they go down river to the ocean 
(out of the fresh water streams and lakes) 

* Both tom-cod and perch are now shipped to the cities in quantities. 



THE BANKS OF THE RIVER 37 

to spawn, instead of coming up. No one 
knows what mysterious depths they pene- 
trate, but it is said that baby eels are found 
in one and two thousand fathoms of water. 
By midsummer they are about six inches 
long, and are running home up the brooks. 
They wriggle up waterfalls and scale the 
sheer faces of dams. They stay three or 
four years in their inland home, growing to 
full size, and in September, the fat grown-up 
eels run down the streams again, to spawn 
in the sea. This is the time when they are 
caught at dams and in mill streams, and 
shipped to the big cities in quantities. Our 
biggest paper mill, not long ago, was shut 
down entirely because of the eels, which got 
in through the flumes by hundreds, and 
stopped the water wheels. 

The taking of the Acushticook eels is now 
a regular industry, and this came about rather 
sadly. Stephen Mitchell, the millwright of 
the Acushticook paper mill, was a fine man, 
with a turn for inventing. His ideas were 
sound and a good many of his mechanical 
devices turned out excellently. He became 
interested in explosives, and worked for a 



38 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

long time at a new method for capping tor- 
pedoes. He had been warned time and again, 
and such an intelligent man must have real- 
ized perfectly the danger of work with ex- 
plosive materials, but one day an accident 
happened. There was an explosion which 
took not only both hands, but his eyes. 

I think everyone in the town felt sickened 
by the accident, and by the prospect of help- 
less invalidism ahead of a fine active man. 
But Stephen, as soon as his wounds healed, 
began looking for something to do. 

The Acushticook eels had always been 
fished for in a desultory fashion, and Stephen 
cast about for a way to make the fishing 
amount to more. The mill owners did all in 
their power to help him. They gladly gave 
him the sole right of the use of the stream, 
and helped him in building his dam. He had 
also a grant from the Legislature. He hired 
good workers, and for many years he and 
his wife, who was a master hand, lived 
happily and successfully on their fishery. 
Sometimes two tons of eels were shipped in 
the course of the autumn. 

Stephen always was cheerful. He could 



THE BANKS OF THE RIVER 39 

see enough difiference between light and dark- 
ness to find his way about town, and he was 
so quick to recognize voices that you forgot 
his bHndness. He kept among people a great 
deal, and was an animated talker at town 
gatherings. He was an opinionated man, but 
a fine and upright one. After his death his 
widow kept on with the fishery, and she still 
runs it with profit. 



CHAPTER IV. 
THE CAPTAINS 

You would never think now that tall India- 
men were once built here in our town, but 
they were, and sailed hence round the world 
away, and we too boasted our wharves, with 
the once-familiar notice: 

" All ships required to cock-a-bill their 
yards before lying at this dock." 

The last ship built in the town was the 
Valley Forge, launched about i860; the last 
built at Bowman's Point, two miles above, 
was the Two Brothers. The Valley Forge for 
ten whole years was never out of Eastern 
waters, plying between China and Sumatra, 
and the seaports of the Inland Sea. 

Mr. Peter Simons, one of our early mag- 
nates, and " ship's husband," of many vessels 
(kind, merry, handsome Mr. Peter, he never 
was husband to anyone but his ships), took 
a treasure voyage to the Spanish Main once, 

and brought home a moderate sized treasure, 

40 



THE CAPTAINS 41 

some of the doubloons of which are pre- 
served in his family to this day. 

Ship-building was the chief industry of the 
place. There were four principal ship-yards. 
The skippers as well as the lumber came from 
close at hand. It seems a wonderful thing, 
in these stay-at-home times, that keen young 
lads from the farms could have been, at 
twenty-one, in command of full-rigged ships, 
fearlessly making their way, in prosperous 
trade, to places that might as well be in 
Mars, for all most of us know of them to-day: 
but Java and the Spice Islands, Shanghai, 
Tasmania, and the Moluccas were household 
words in those days, and you still hear a 
sentence now and then which shows the one- 
time familiarity of ways which have passed 
from our knowledge. 

The portraits at the house of Captain 
George Annable, the last of our clipper-ship 
captains, were painted in Antwerp. So were 
those (very queer ones), at Captain Charles 
Aiken's, and at Captain Andrews'. It 
appears now in talk with Captain Annable 
that of course they were painted at Antwerp, 
for that was where the American skippers 



42 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

as a rule wintered. Living there was better 
and cheaper for them and their families than 
at any other foreign port. It became the cus- 
tom to winter at Antwerp, and there grew 
to be an American society there. 

Captain Annable has crossed the Atlantic 
sixty-three times, sailing clipper mail-ships. 

The Captains are nearly all gone now. Lit- 
tle trace of the ship-yards remains, and even 
the wharves from which the Indiamen sailed 
have rotted, and been replaced by the lumber 
and coal wharves of to-day; but all through 
the countryside you come on touches of the 
shipping days, and of the East, as startling 
as a sudden fragrance of sandalwood in some 
old cabinet. At one house I know there is a 
collection of butterflies and moths of the 
Far East, with two cream-colored Atlas 
moths eight inches from tip to tip. At an- 
other there is a set of rice-paper paintings 
of the orders of the Japanese nobility and 
gentry, with full insignia of state robes, which 
ought to be in a museum; and the parlor of 
a third neighbor, the gracious widow of a sea- 
captain, has, besides carved teak furniture and 
Chinese embroideries, a set of carved ivory 



THE CAPTAINS 43 

chessmen fit for a palace. The king and 
queen stand over eight inches high. The 
castles are true elephant-and-castles, and the 
pawns are tiny mounted and turbaned war- 
riors, brandishing scimetars. The figures 
stand on carved open-work balls-within-balls, 
four deep — "' Laborious Orient ivory, sphere 
in sphere " — as delicate as frost-work. This 
set was bought in Shanghai, when the foreign 
compound still had its guard of soldiers, and 
the Chinese thronged the doorways to stare 
at the " white devils." 

The great gold-figured lacquer cabinet, the 
pride of one of our statelier houses, was 
brought from China a hundred years ago, by 
a young Captain Jameson, who was coming 
home for his wedding. He sailed again with 
his bride immediately after the marriage, 
and their ship never was heard of. The 
cabinet was sold, and then sold again, till 
it finally reached the setting which fits it so 
well. 

You find lacquered Indian tea-poys, 
Eastern porcelains, shells and corals from all 
round the world far out in scattered farm- 
houses; and farm-hands are still summoned to 



44 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

meals by a blast on a conch-shell, a queer 
note, not unlike the belling of an elk. 

Beside the actual china and embroideries 
and carvings, something of the character bred 
in the seafaring days has spread, like nourish- 
ing silt, through our countryside. The Cap- 
tains were grave, quiet men. They had power 
of command, and keenness in emergency. 
Contact with many people of many nations 
quickened their perceptions and gave them 
charming manners; but more than this, there 
was something large-minded and tranquil 
about them. All their lives they had to deal 
with an element stronger than themselves. The 
next day's work could never be planned or 
calculated on, and something of the detached 
quality which comes from dealing with the 
sea, a long and simple perspective towards 
human affairs, became part of them. 

An expression of married life, so beautiful 
that I can never forget it, came from the 
lips of the widow of one of our sea-captains, 
a little old lady, now over eighty, who lives 
alone in a tiny brick cottage (where she has 
accomplished the almost unique feat of mak- 
ing English ivy flourish in our sub-arctic 



THE CAPTAINS 45 

climate). She wears a wonderful cap, and 
fills her house with quilts and cushions 
of silk patch-work which would make a 
kaleidoscope blink. I had an errand to her 
about a poorer neighbor, one Thanksgiving 
time. Her house is an outlying one, and I 
remember how the farm lights, scattered all 
about our river hills, shone in the soft autumn 
evening. 

Her bright warm kitchen was coziness itself, 
with a shiny stove, full to the brim with red 
coals, and a big lamp. She sat with her cat on 
her knee, sewing on an orange and green cush- 
ion, made in queer little puffs, and she jumped 
up, dropping thimble, and spectacles, in her 
warm-hearted welcome. After my errand, we 
fell into talk, about " Cap'n," and their long 
voyaging together. That was when the Cap- 
tains as a matter of course took their wives, 
and often their children, with them, keeping 
a cow on board for the family's use, and 
sometimes chickens and pigs. Many babies 
who grew to be sturdy citizens were born 
on the high seas in those days. 

She told about long peaceful days, slipping 
through the Trades, and about gales, but 



46 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

mostly about china and pottery, for this was 
their hobby, almost their passion. They took 
inconvenient journeys of great length to see 
new potteries, and hoped at last to see all the 
sea-board china factories, in East and West. 
She showed me her treasures, pretty bits of 
Sevres, majolica, Doulton, and Wedgewood, 
all standing together, and among them an 
alabaster model of the leaning tower of Pisa 
(Pysa, she called it). At last, with a lowered 
voice, she spoke of the worst danger they had 
ever been through, a typhoon in the Bay of 
Bengal. The ship lay dismasted, and the 
waves broke over her helplessness. She was 
lifted up and dashed down like a log, and 
every soul on board expected only to perish. 
'' Cap'n come downstairs to our cabin: 
" Oh, Mary," he says, '' if only you was to 
home! I could die easy if only you was to 
home ! " 

"I be to home!" I says. ''If I had the 

wings of a dove, I wouldn't be anywheres 

but where I be! " 

This ranks with the epitaph at Nantucket: 

" Think what a wife should be, and she 

was that!" 



THE CAPTAINS 47 

Another seafaring friend was, as so often 
happens, the last person whom you would 
ever connect with adventures, a little lady so 
tiny, so dainty, that a trip across the lawn 
with garden gloves and hat, to tie up her 
roses, might have been her longest excursion; 
but instead she has sailed round and round 
the world with her courtly sea-captain father, 
has lifted her quiet gray eyes to see coral 
islands and spice islands, and the strange 
mountain ranges of the East Indies. 

" She wore white mostly when we were in 
the Trades or the Tropics," her father has 
told me, " and she sat on deck all day, with 
her white fancy-work. She always seemed 
to like whatever was happening." 

One day, in a fog with a heavy sea running, 
the ship ran on a reef. The life-saving crew 
got the men off with great difficulty, but the 
Captain refused to leave his post, and little 
Miss Jessie refused too. 

'* No, thank you," she said, in her soft voice, 
" No, thanks very much, I think I will stay 
with the Captain." 

" And you couldn't move her," he said, 
" any more than the rock of Gibraltar." 



48 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

With the night the storm lessened, and al- 
most by a miracle the ship was got off safely 
next morning. 

I must tell of one more seafaring couple, 
who lived down the river in a low white cot- 
tage where " Captain," retired from service, 
could watch vessels passing, even without his 
handsome brass-bound binoculars, a much- 
prized tribute for life-saving. 

The wife was long paralyzed, and the Cap- 
tain, with the simple-minded nephew they 
had adopted, tended her as he might have 
tended an adored child. He bought her silk 
waists, fine aprons, little frills of one sort or 
another, fastened them on her with clumsy, 
loving fingers, and then would sit back, laugh- 
ing with pride, while the paralyzed woman, 
with her wrecked face, managed to make un- 
couth sounds of pleasure. 

''Don't she look handsome? Don't she 
look nice as anybody?" he would ask of the 
neighbors, and show the new wig he had 
bought her, as the poor hair was thin. His 
simple pride thought it as beautiful as any 
young girl's curls, and indeed it was very 
youthful. One's heart was wrung, yet up- 



THE CAPTAINS 49 

lifted, too, for here was love which had passed 
through the absolute wrecking of life, and 
was untouched. 

The Captain was a tall hearty man, but it 
was he who died first, after all, and all in a 
minute. The paralyzed creature thus be- 
reaved, moaned, day after day; her eyes 
seemed to be asking for something, there in 
the room, and no one could find the right 
thing, till someone thought of the Captain's 
binoculars, which he always had by him. 
From that moment she became tranquil, and 
even grew happy again, if only she had the 
bright brass thing where her poor hand could 
touch it. If it was moved, she moaned for 
it to be set back. It was her precious token, 
from his hand to hers. With it beside 
her she could wait and be good, poor dear 
soul, until, in about two years, her release 
came, and she went to join " Captain." 

One word more about Mr. Peter Simons, of 
whom the town keeps pleasant memories. He 
lived handsomely, in a handsome house over- 
looking the river, and his housekeeper, Deb- 
orah Twycross, was as much of a magnate 
in her own way as himself. Mr. Peter was 



so A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

very high with her; but he stood in awe of 
her, too. Still, he never would let her engage 
his second servant, a privilege which she 
coveted. 

In his young days a " hired girl " received 
$2.00 a week wages, if she could milk, $1.50 
if she could not. By the time Mr. Peter was 
established in stately bachelor housekeeping 
no girl was any longer expected to milk, and 
few knew how. But when engaging a serv- 
ant, if he did not like the applicant's looks, 
Mr. Peter would say, 

" Can you milk? " 

Of course, she could not, and there the 
matter would end. He never asked a girl 
whose looks he liked, if she could milk! 

He was a man of endless secret benevo- 
lence, and posed all the time as a hard-fisted 
person and a miser. He was at the most de- 
vious pains to conceal his constant kindnesses. 
The noble minister who at that time carried 
our Town on his young shoulders, received 
sums of money, in every time of need, for 
library, schools, or cases of poverty and suf- 
fering, directed in a variety of elaborately 
disguised handwritings. He was able in 



THE CAPTAINS 51 

time to trace them all to Mr. Peter. Many 
a struggling young man was set on his feet 
and established in life by this secret bene- 
factor; and after Mr. Peter's death, his 
coal dealer told how for years he had had 
orders to deliver loads of coal to this and 
that family in distress, after dark, and as 
noiselessly as possible, under an agreement 
of secrecy, enforced by such threats that he 
never dared disobey. 

The Town has changed since Mr. Peter's 
day. Boys no longer brave the terrors of a 
visit to a White Witch to have their warts 
charmed, or a toothache healed. (" Mother 
Hatch," who plied her arts some thirty years 
ago, was the last of these. Her appliances 
for fortune-telling were the correct ones of 
cards, an ink-well, and a glass to gaze in; 
but a small trembling sufferer in knicker- 
bockers — a hero to the still more trembling 
group of friends and eggers-on outside — 
did not benefit by these higher mysteries. 
The enchantress, beside her traffic in the black 
arts, took in washing; she would withdraw 
her hands from the suds, and lay a reeking 
finger on the offending tooth, the patient 



52 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

gasping and shutting his terror-stricken eyes 
while she recited a sufficient incantation.) 

Even the memory of the Whipping-post, 
which still stood in Mr. Peter's childhood, has 
long since vanished. The town bell is no 
longer rung at seven in the morning and at 
noon, and a steam fire-whistle has replaced 
the tocsin of alarm that formerly was rung 
from all the church steeples ; but the curfew 
still rings every night, at nine in the evening 
(the bell which rings it was made by Paul 
Revere); and, among the customary Scrip- 
tural-sounding offices of fence-viewers, field- 
drivers, measurers of wood and bark, etc., 
the town still has a town crier. A very few 
years ago it still had a pound-keeper and 
hog-reeve, but by now the outlines of the 
pound itself have disappeared. 



CHAPTER V 
BY THE ACUSHTICOOK 

A smaller river, the Acushticook, tumbles 
and foams down through the midst of our 
town, and brings us the wonderfully soft 
pure water of a chain of over twenty lakes 
and ponds. It flung the hills apart to join 
the larger stream which it meets at right 
angles at the Town Bridge, and the last 
mile of its course is through a beautiful small 
gorge, in a succession of falls, now compacted 
into the eight dams which turn our mills. 

Above the falls, though it breaks into 
occasional rapids, its course is quieter, and 
as you travel towards the setting sun, your 
canoe follows a peaceful stream, running for 
the most part through woods. 

The country along the Acushticook is 
broken and hilly, woods or open pastures full 
of boulders and junipers. The farms depend 
on their stock and apple orchards for their 
prosperity. You see big chicken yards, and 

53 



54 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

the more enterprising farmers send their eggs 
and broilers to city markets. Pigs do well 
among the apple trees, and most of the farms 
have ducks and geese as well as chickens. A 
well-trodden road follows the crest of the 
ridge, parallel to the river. 

The Baxters, good, silent people, live well 
out on this road, and handsome Ambrose Bax- 
ter has a thriving milk route. Sefami Baxter, 
his uncle, worked in the paper mill his whole 
life, and now his son, young Sefami, has 
built up a good market garden business on 
the Acushticook road. He started it years 
ago with a tiny greenhouse, which he built 
on to his farm kitchen. He raised tomatoes 
and other seedlings, and early lettuce. It 
was an innovation in our part of the world, 
and neighbors shook their heads; but one bit 
of greenhouse was added to another, and now 
Sefami has three long stacks of them and is 
a prosperous man. He has a whole field of 
rhubarb and a large orchard, where he keeps 
twenty hives of bees. He had no capital be- 
yond the savings of a plain working family, 
and he had to find his market for himself. 

The Drews, now old people, live beyond 



BY THE ACUSHTICOOK 55 

Ambrose Baxter, and life has been a more 
poignant thing for them than for most of 
the farm neighbors. Their boy, Lawrence, 
was born for learning. He foamed to it, as 
a stream rushes down hill, and he had the 
vision and faithfulness which lead to high and 
lonely places. The parents were industrious 
and frugal, and Lawrence was the channel 
through which everything they had, mind and 
ambitions as well as savings, poured itself 
out. As a boy, he was all ardor and eager- 
ness. Now he is a tall careworn man of 
fifty, unmarried, with hair and beard streaked 
with gray. He is a man of importance in 
many ways beside that of his own depart- 
ment in a great Western university. He is 
a good son, and comes home to the comfort- 
able white farm-house for every day in the 
year that it is possible, but his parents, of 
necessity, have had to grow old without him, 
and their look, in speaking of him, is one of 
acceptance, as well as of a high pride. 

Acushticook has changed her course from 
time to time through the centuries, and about 
five miles from town a stretch of flat land 
which must once have been either intervale 



56 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

along the river's course or one of its many 
small lakes, lies pocketed among the hills. 
This stretch, which is very fertile, belongs, 
or belonged, to the Dunnacks, and they were 
surely a family which will be remembered. 
They never pretended to be anything more 
than plain farming people, but they were 
marked by a personal dignity and refinement, 
even fastidiousness, by their intelligence, and 
alas, by their many sorrows. Old Warren 
Dunnack was a farmer of substance. His 
son, the Warren Dunnack of our time, was 
nearly all his life in charge of the '' Home- 
stead " (one of the few country places in 
our neighborhood), during the long absence 
abroad of its owners. He married a beauti- 
ful woman, Sarah Brant. She was a magnifi- 
cent creature, in a hard, almost animal sort 
of way, but was a shallow person, with a 
vain nature, coveting show, fine food and 
clothes, and she broke Warren's heart. He 
took her back again and again after her many 
flights, for he had an unconquerable chivalry 
and gentleness for all women, and he let her 
have everything that he could earn. 

Lucretia was the beauty of the family, a 



BY THE ACUSHTICOOK 57 

slip of a girl with eyes like black diamonds. 
She married a showy business man, who 
turned out badly. She came home, a hand- 
some and embittered older woman, and made 
life uncomfortable for herself and everyone 
else on the farm. Afterwards she became 
companion to a widow of some means, a 
fantastic person, and they lived together (un- 
harmoniously) all their days. 

Delia, who was so pretty, though not strik- 
ing like Lucretia, married silly Ephraim Sim- 
mons; but her afifection for her brother War- 
ren was the abiding thing of her life. When 
Warren's wife left him, and Delia was offered 
the position of housekeeper at the Homestead, 
she took it, and there she and Warren kept 
house for fifteen years. Two good-natured 
slack daughters (they were all Simmons; not 
a trace of their mother's fire in them) helped 
Ephraim with his farm, and he certainly 
needed the money that their mother earned. 
He was a poor enough farmer; but his foolish 
face used to look wistful when he drove the 
six miles, every other Saturday, to see Delia. 

Delia, for her part, never seemed anything 
but clear as to her duty. She drove over 



58 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

now and then to see Ephraim, and sent her 
money to him and the girls, or put it in the 
bank for them, but her heart clave to her 
brother. She kept the long delightfully 
rambling house, and he kept the farm, lawns, 
and gardens, punctiliously in order for the 
owners who never came; and the honey- 
suckles blossomed in the corner of the great 
dark hedges, the lilies opened, and the grapes 
ripened and dropped on the sunny terraces of 
the garden as the unmarked years went by. I 
think that Delia's life was one of untroubled 
serenity. Warren was a grave man, and his 
trouble with his wife underlay all his days, 
but with Delia he found a rare companion- 
ship and understanding. Their sitting-room 
in the ell of the big house was a gathering 
place for the farm neighbors. There was a 
deep fireplace, a table with a big lamp, a 
sofa, high-backed arm-chairs with worsted- 
work cushions and tidies, and windows filled 
with blossoming plants. 

Warren died after a lingering illness, which 
he met with his usual grave cheerfulness, and 
Delia went back to Ephraim on the Acushti- 
cook road. Whatever she thought of the dif- 



BY THE ACUSHTICOOK 59 

ference between the Homestead and the bare 
little farm, between Warren and Ephraim, 
she met the change with the charming, half- 
whimsical philosophy that was hers through 
life. She had pretty ways, and an uncon- 
querable sense of fun. She lived to be nearly 
eighty. She was a fine, fine woman; deli- 
cately organized, but of such vigorous fibre 
that she struck her roots deep into life, and 
gave out good to everyone who came near 
her. She was a magnet, drawing people by 
her warmth and sweetness. 

It was to poor, good, hard-working John 
Dunnack that actual tragedy came. He was a 
plain dull man, of a far humbler stripe than 
his brothers. Misfortune came to his only 
child, a young adopted daughter. He lost 
his place at the mill not long after, from 
age. He was eighty years old. It was too 
much. His mind failed, and he took his own 
life. 

A cheerful family, the Greenleafs, live next 
beyond the Dunnacks. They keep bees on 
a large scale, and " Greenleaf Honey," in 
pretty-shaped glass jars, with a green beech 
leaf on the label, has had its established 



6o A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

market for two generations. They also grew 
cherries for market, nearly as large as 
damsons. 

Harvey Greenleaf had luck, and has what 
our people know as " gumption," and '' git- 
up-and-git," and Mrs. Greenleaf, a fair, ample 
person, is a born woman of business. Once a 
neighbor, a farm hand, who had been dis- 
charged for slackness, planted buckwheat in 
a small clearing next the Greenleafs', out of 
spite. (Buckwheat honey is unmarketable, 
because of its marked peculiar flavor, and 
its dark color.) Harvey was away at the 
County Grange Meeting — he was Master of 
his Grange that year — at the time it flowered. 
Two little girls, out picking wild raspberries, 
brought word of the trouble. 

''Mis' Greenleaf! Mis' Greenleaf! There's 
buckwheat in blow at Jasper Derry's clearing, 
an' it's full of your bees!" 

Mrs. Greenleaf harnessed up the old white 
mare herself, and drove over to the offender's 
house. No one knows how she dealt with 
him, but the buckwheat was cut before night. 
Harvey chuckles, and says she swung the 
scythe herself. Not much harm was done, and 



BY THE ACUSHTICOOK 6i 

only a little of the yield turned out to have 
been injured by the buckwheat. 

There are no rules about the planting of 
buckwheat near bee-hives. It is a matter of 
good feeling and neighborliness, and buck- 
wheat is seldom grown where a neighbor 
keeps bees for profit; but it is impossible to 
guard against the trouble entirely and I have 
known a whole season's yield to be discolored, 
with honey brought from buckwheat, nine 
miles from the hives. 

One early morning this June, as we were at 
breakfast on the piazza, a boy came round 
the corner of the house, and asked if we 
wanted " a quart of wild strawberries, a pint 
of cream, and a dozen of Mother's fresh rolls, 
for forty cents!" We certainly did; and in 
the driveway we saw " Mother " waiting in 
the wagon, an alert-looking woman with a 
friendly face. She told us that she was 
Harvey Greenleaf's daughter-in-law, and the 
boy her eldest son. 

" I think there's lots of small extra business 
that folks can do on the farms, if they're 
spry, that sets things ahead a lot," she said, 
a propos of the strawberries. 



62 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

The rolls were as light as feather, and the 
cream very thick. We arranged for the same 
bargain twice a week while the berry season 
lasted ! 

In the autumn the same couple came again, 
this time with vegetables and fruit, nicely 
arranged, and with small cakes of fresh cream 
cheese done up in waxed paper in neat pack- 
ages, each package stamped with S. Green- 
leaf, Eagle Cliff Farm. This is a new ven- 
ture in our part of the country. 

A mile of beautiful pasture, on a big scale, 
as smooth as an English down, slopes down 
from the back of the Greenleafs' farm, rises 
in a noble ridge, and slopes again to where 
the Acushticook sparkles and dances over 
some thirty yards of rapids. The turf is 
close cropped and there are boulders and 
groups of half-sized firs and spruces scattered 
over the slope. There is a little wood in the 
upper corner, cool and shadowy, with a 
brooklet set deep in mosses, trickling through 
the midst. The pasture road leads through 
the firs and hemlocks, growing closer and 
more feathery, then through this wood, where 
Lady's Slippers grow. 



CHAPTER VI 
SPRING 

April 3. 

Last night the river " went out." We were 
so used, all winter, to its sleeping whiteness, 
that it seemed as unlikely to change as the 
outlines of the hills; then came a tumultuous 
week, and now it is a brown, strong, full- 
running stream, with swirls and whirlpools 
of hastening current all over its wide surface. 
These are indescribable days. The air is 
sweet with wet bark and melting snow and 
newly-uncovered earth. The lesser streams 
are rushing and roaring through the woods. 
There are little clear dark foam-topped pools 
under all the spouts, and bright drops falling 
from rocks and roofs, where there were icicles 
so lately; and the roads endure miniature 
floods, from the torrents of snow-water that 
gush down their gutters and spread the mud 
in fan-shapes over them. Wherever you 
stand, you cannot get away from the rush- 
es 



64 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

ing and trickling and rilling. The whole 
frozen strength of winter is breaking up in a 
wealth of life-giving waters. 

There is a neglected-looking time for the 
fields just after the snow goes. The snow- 
patches recede and leave the soaked grass 
covered with odds and ends of loose sticks 
and roots and with untidy wefts of cobweb. 
The dead leaves lie limp and dank, and are 
of lovely but sad colors, soft browns and 
umbers, ash-grays and ash-purples; but in the 
midst of this waste the ponds are all awake — 
dimpling, soft water, tender and alive — and 
their bright blue is a new wonder after our 
winter world of white and brown and gray. 

Robins came yesterday. Their crisp voices 
woke us with a start, after the winter's 
silence. They were busy all over the lawn, 
and nearly a week ago we heard the first 
blue-birds and meadow-larks. 

The fir boughs that were banked about the 
houses last fall, for warmth, must be burnt, 
and bonfires are being lighted all about the 
fields and gardens. They blaze up into a 
crackling roar of burning brush, and the 
smoke comes pouring and creaming out 



SPRING Gs 

in thick white torrents. The clean, hilarious 
smell spreads everywhere, the touch of it 
clings to our hair and clothing. This is a 
wonderful, Indian time for children, when all 
sorts of strange inherited knowledge stirs in 
them. Look at their eyes, as they play and 
plan round their fires! 

Cumulus clouds came back, as always, with 
late winter. Through the autumn, and early 
winter, clear days are practically cloudless; 
and cloud-masses, cirrhus, not cumulus, herald 
and follow storms; but with February, the 
clear-weather summer clouds return. They 
begin to be trim again, and marshaled, and 
take up the ordered leisurely sailing of their 
pretty squadrons. 

April lo. 

There is already a general warming and 
yellowing of twigs. The elm tops are grow- 
ing feathery and show a warm brown, and a 
crimson-coral mist begins to flush over the 
low-lying woods, where the swamp maples 
are in flower. Pussy-willows are as thick on 
their twigs as drops after a rain, and as 
silvery. You would say at first that nothing 
had changed yet in the main forest. The 



66 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

brown aisles and misty dark hollows seem 
the same, but no; fringed about the openings 
and coverts along their borders the birch and 
alder catkins are in flower. They are powdery 
and gold-colored, and overhead they dangle 
like the tails of little fairy sheep against the 
sky. 

The wild geese woke us in the dark, just 
before dawn, this morning. Last year there 
was a violent snow-storm, a perfect smother- 
ing whirl of flakes, the night they flew over, 
and the great birds were beaten down among 
the house-tops, creakling and honkling in dis- 
may and confusion, but holding on their 
way. 

Now at dusk comes the first silvery even- 
ing whistling of the frogs, the peepers. If 
a cloud passes over the sun, even as early 
as three in the afternoon, they start up as 
if at a signal, all together, and as the sun 
shines out again fall instantly silent. 

May 3. 

All this time the green has been spreading 
and spreading through the pastures till now 
it clothes them, and the dandelions are scat- 
tered over them like a king's largesse. Dew 



SPRING 67 

falls all winter, but it is in star and fern 
shapes of frost; now every morning and even- 
ing the thick grass is pearled again with a 
million nourishing drops. 

Now rainbow colors begin to show over the 
hillsides. It is as if a thousand and a thou- 
sand tiny butterflies, pink and cream color 
and living green and crimson, had alighted 
in the woods. Light comes through them, 
and they give back light, from the shining, 
fine down that covers them. The little leaves 
are almost like clear jewels against the sun, 
beaded all over the twigs. They only make a 
slightly dotted veil as yet, they do not hide 
or screen. You can see as far into the wood- 
openings as in winter. The brown stems and 
branches are as delicate and distinct as those 
of a bed of maiden-hair fern. 

The roadside willows are puffs of gold-green 
smoke, the sapling birches and quaking aspens 
like green mounting flames up the hillsides, 
and the catkins of the canoe birches shine like 
the mist of gold sparks from a rocket. 

The different trees develop by different 
stages, and each stands out in turn against 
its fellows, as if illuminated, before it loses 



68 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

itself in the growing sea of green. You see 
its full leafy shape, the mass of each round 
top, as at no other time of year; yet 
the individual habit of branching is still 
manifest, as in winter: the long springing 
sprays of the swamp maples, the more com- 
pact strong branches of the oaks, the maze- 
like firm twigs of the hop-hornbeams, lying 
in whorls and layers. The branchlets of the 
beeches are like thorns. The elms are soft 
brown spirits of trees throughout the woods; 
their entire fern-like outline is silhouetted, 
and the swamp maples stand like delicate 
living shapes of bronze. 

Innocents are out in patches in the pas- 
tures, looking as if white powder had been 
spilt. Purple and white hepaticas are clus- 
tered in crannies of the rocks, and after a 
rain may-flowers stand up thick, thick in the 
fields, in masses of pink and white fragrance. 
Blood-root covers whole banks with snow- 
white, and dog-tooth violets, littlest of lilies, 
nod their yellow-and-brown prettiness over 
the slopes carpeted with their strange mottled 
leaves. 

Shad-bush is out now in fairy white, tas- 



SPRING 69 

seled over knolls and hillsides and overhang- 
ing wooded banks along the streams. Its 
opening leaves are reddish, delicately serrate, 
and finely downy. The pure white flowers are 
loosely starred all over it. They are long- 
petaled and lightly hung, and the tree is 
slender and very pliable, the whole thing sug- 
gesting a delicate raggedness, as if young 
Spring went lightly on bare feet with flutter- 
ing clothes. 

This is the most fairy-scented time of the 
whole year. " The wood-bine spices are wafted 
abroad," indeed. The willows perfume the 
lanes with their intoxicating sweetness; and 
there is a cool pure dawn-like fragrance every- 
where, from the countless millions of opening 
leaves, steeped every night with dew. 

Last week we saw the first swallows. 
There they skimmed and flew, as if they 
had never gone to other skies at all. Their 
flight is so efifortless, they seem to pour and 
stream down unseen cataracts of air. To-day 
chimney-swallows came, and we watched 
their endless rippling and circling. They 
sailed and wheeled, in little companies or 
singly, now twittering and now silent, and 



70 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

from now on all summer the sky will never 
be empty of their beautiful activities. 

May 26. 

At last the woods are like a garden of 
delicate flowers, clothing the hills as far as 
eye ' can see with colors of sunrise. The 
red-oaks are gold color, with strong brown 
stems; ash and lindens are golden green; 
maples soft copper and bronze, or deep flesh- 
color. 

The flower-like delicacy of leafing out is 
wonderfully prolonged. The willows come 
first, then elms, in brown flower, then quak- 
ing-asps and birches, and then maples. Later, 
lindens and ash-trees catch the light, and the 
ash leaves (which grow far apart, and in 
bunches, with the flower-buds) are indeed 
like just-alighted butterflies. The small leaves 
are so bright that even in the rain they shine 
as if a shaft of sunlight from some unseen 
break in the clouds were lighting the 
woods. 

Now long shining leaf buds show among 
the elm flowers and on the beeches. The 
later poplars are cream-white and as downy 
as velvet. A wood of maples and poplars 



SPRING 71 

is almost a pink-and-white wood; shell-pink, 
and palest, most silvery-and-creamy gray. 

The tall gold-colored red-oaks make masses 
of strong color; and later, when we think the 
shimmering of the fairy rainbow is fading, the 
white oaks come out in a mist of pale carna- 
tion — pink and gray and cream. 

In June, after all the hardwoods have 
merged into uniform light green, firs and 
spruces become jeweled at every point with 
tips of light, the new growth for the year. 
Red pines and white pines are set all over 
with candelabra of lighter green, until high 
on the tops of the seeding white pines little 
clusters of finger-slender pale green cones 
begin to show. 

By this time the forest-flowers have faded 
through the woods. The brighter colors of 
the field-flowers are gay along the roadsides 
and over meadows and pastures, and with 
them Summer has come. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE EASTMAN HILL CROSS- 
ROAD 

The cross-road under the great leafy ridge 
of Eastman Hill has pretty farms along it, 
and half-way across there is a country burying 
ground, where wild plums blossom, and the 
grave-stones are half hidden all summer in 
a green thicket. 

One name in the graveyard we all hold 
in special honor, that of Serena Eastman. 
I never knew her myself, and it is only 
from her granddaughter and from the neigh- 
bors that I learned of her beautiful life. 

She was a mother in Israel; one of 

" All-Saints — the unknown good 
that rest 
In God's still memory folded deep." 

She brought up eleven children to upright 
manhood and womanhood, and beside this a 
whole neighborhood was nourished from the 

wells of her deep nature. She lived and died 

72 



EASTMAN HILL CROSS-ROAD 73 

before the days of trained nurses, and in addi- 
tion to her own cares she was the principal 
nurse of her countryside. Those were the 
days when nursing was not and could not be 
paid for, but was a priceless gift from neigh- 
bor to neighbor. She stood ready to be up 
all night, and night after night, to ease pain 
by her ministering, or to help to bring a new 
life into the world; her faith lifted the spirits 
of the dying, and of those about to be be- 
reaved, as if on strong pinions. 

Small-pox was still a terrible scourge in 
those times, and she was the only woman in 
the district who would nurse it. Her grand- 
daughter has told me how she kept a change 
of clothes in an out-house, and how she 
bathed and dressed there (the only precau- 
tions against infection known to the times), 
whether in winter or summer, before rejoin- 
ing her family. She always drove to and 
from such cases at night, to run as little 
danger as possible of coming in contact with 
people. Her husband took the same risks 
that she did. He drove back and forth, 
and lent his strength in lifting and carrying 
patients. 



74 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

They had a large farm, which meant cook- 
ing for hired men in the busy seasons, and 
beside Serena's eleven children there were 
older relations to do for, her husband's father 
and mother, and one or two unmarried sisters. 
She was active in Dorcas society and in meet- 
ing. Her grand-daughter feels that only the 
completeness of her religious life could have 
carried her through the fatigues which she 
underwent. She lived in that conscious obe- 
dience to duty which eliminates friction, and 
her view of duty was one taken through wide- 
opened windows. She walked with God 
daily. 

The house of this dear woman burned, not 
long after she and her husband died, and only 
the blossoming lilacs mark its empty cellar- 
hole, but the next farm, which belonged to Mr. 
Eastman's brother, and is now his nephew's, is 
a fine one. You drive on to a wide green, as 
smoothly kept as a lawn, where three huge 
trees, a willow and two elms, overhang the 
house. There are big comfortable barns and 
outhouses, a corn-crib and well-sweep, and 
the house is square and ample, with two big 
chimneys. 



EASTMAN HILL CROSS-ROAD 75 

Next to the Eastmans', beyond their or- 
chard, comes a neat small farm, with a long 
wide stone wall, where grapes are trained, 
owned once by two queer old sisters, the 
Misses Pushard, or as we have it, the Miss 
Pushhards. (A Huguenot name, pronounced 
Pushaw by the older generation.) They went 
to Lyceum in their young days, and, a rare 
thing then so far in the country, they had 
a piano. This gave them " a great shape." 
Poor ladies, with their piano! Years later 
they were in straitened circumstances, and 
anxious to sell it, but to their indignation 
nobody wanted it, or not at the price they 
thought fitting; so, one night, they chopped 
it up, and hid the pieces. Thus they were 
not left with the instrument on their hands; 
and they had not accepted an unworthy price 
for their treasure. All this was learned years 
afterwards from some old papers. The frag- 
ments of the piano were found in the cistern. 

The last farm on the road is owned by 
Sam Marston and his dear wife, Susan; who, 
though you never would think it (except for 
a little remaining crispness of speech), was 
born in England, in Essex, and came as a 



76 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

young English housemaid — dear me, how 
long ago now! — to the Homestead, eight 
miles away, by the River. Sam Marston 
worked there in the stables, and lost his heart 
promptly, and after four or five years of 
characteristic Yankee courting, leisurely, but 
humorously determined, Susan made up her 
mind, and said " yes," and came out to the 
farm, with her fresh print gowns, her trim- 
ness and stanchness, and her abiding religion. 

Susan keeps also her fixed ideas of the 
" quality." She is now a power in her whole 
neighborhood. She and Sam, alas, have no 
children, a great sorrow, but the young peo- 
ple growing up near her show the reflection 
of her uprightness and that of her Sam. 
But after all these years she is still an exotic. 
The Sunday-school which she has gathered 
about her is strictly Church of England. 
The children learn their catechism, and " to 
do their duty in life in that station into 
which it shall please God to call them"; and 
they are instructed perfectly clearly as to 
their betters! 

The other day we drove out to her farm. 
We were going to climb Eastman Hill, after 



EASTMAN HILL CROSS-ROAD 77 

Lady's Slippers, and then were to have supper 
with Susan. 

The sky was very deep blue, with flocks of 
little white clouds sailing. The woods were 
still all different shades of light and bright 
green, and the apple trees were in full blos- 
som. The barn swallows were skimming and 
pouring low about the green fields in their 
effortless flight. I think I never drove 
through so smiling a country. 

The house is a long low brick one, with 
dormer windows, in the midst of an old 
orchard. There is a fence and a hedge, and 
a brick path leads to the door. There are 
lilac bushes at the corner of the house, and 
cinnamon roses and yellow lilies on each 
side of the doorway. 

Susan came out, laughing, and nearly cry- 
ing, with pleasure, to welcome us. She 
" jumped " us down with her kind hands, 
and took all our wraps. We went as far as 
the house, asking questions and chattering, 
and then Susan showed us our way, an open- 
ing in the screen of the woods reached by a 
path through the orchard, and stood shading 
her eyes with her hand to look after us. 



78 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

We followed a bit of mossy old corduroy 
road, through moist rich woods, and then 
began to climb among a wood of beeches. 
Soon the rock began to crop out in small 
clififs, and we found different treasures, the 
little pale pink corydalis, a black-and-white 
creeper's nest in a ferny cleft between two 
rocks, quantities of twin-flower, and then, 
rising a beech-covered knoll, we came on our 
first Lady's Slippers. The glade ahead was 
thronged with them. They spread their 
broad light-green leaves like wings, and their 
beautiful heads bent proudly. They grew 
sometimes singly, sometimes in clumps 
of fifteen or twenty blossoms, and were 
scattered over the whole glade as if a 
flight of rose-colored butterflies had just 
alighted. 

We came on this same sight seven differ- 
ent times; this lovely company scattered over 
the slope among the rocks, where the ridge 
broke out into low gray pinnacles among the 
beeches. 

When at last we could make up our minds 
to climb down, following the white thread 
of a water-fall, into the deeper woods, we 



EASTMAN HILL CROSS-ROAD 79 

found Painted Trilliums, bright white and 
painted with crimson, with Jack-in-the-pulpits, 
both grown to a great size in the rich mould, 
amongst a green mist of uncurling ferns. 

The brook which we followed came out at 
last in an open pasture above the farm. It 
was as refreshing as a bath in running water 
to come out into the cool, sweet evening air, for 
the heavy woods were warm, and there had 
been quantities of black flies and mosquitoes, 
which our hands were too full to fight. Be- 
side all our baskets, our handkerchiefs and 
hats were full of flowers. One of our number 
carried a young cherry tree, with roots and 
sod, over his shoulder, and mosses in his 
pockets, and the girls had Lady's Slippers and 
fern roots in their caught-up skirts. 

The turf was powdered white as snow with 
Innocents, and there were violets. The pas- 
ture slopes down through dark needle-pointed 
clumps of balsam fir, and scattered haw- 
thorn and cherry trees, which were in flower. 
A hermit thrush sang from one of the firs 
as we came down. The heavenly, pure caril- 
lon rang out again and again, as dusk fell 
deeper, the singer altering the pitch with each 



8o A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

repetition of the song, ringing one lovely 
change after another. 

Such a supper was set out on the porch! 
Fresh rolls and butter, cream cheese and 
chicken, jugs of milk and cream, fresh hot 
gingerbread, and bowls of wild strawberries. 
The porch runs out into the orchard, and the 
white petals of the apple-blossoms drifted 
down as we sat laughing and talking. Susan 
placed her chair near us, but nothing would 
induce her to eat with us, and she jumped up 
every minute and fluttered into the house, to 
press more good things on us. Presently, 
Sam came in from milking, and was a fellow- 
Yankee and a brother at once. 

We could hardly bear to go home, and al- 
most took Sam's offer (which so scandalized 
Susan) of a night in the hay in the new 
barn. It would be so pretty to lie watching 
the swallows darting in and out after sun- 
rise. 

We went all through Susan's trim farm- 
house, and saw her dairy, with its airy 
and spotless arrangements. The milk, thick 
and yellow with cream, was in curious blue 
glass pans, which Susan said came long ago 



EASTMAN HILL CROSS-ROAD 8i 

from the Homestead. We saw all the chick- 
ens, the calves, and the black pigs. The 
Jerseys blew long breaths at us from their 
mangers, and the horses put out their soft 
noses for sugar. The ducks were quacking 
and waddling all over the yard, and the 
pigeons fluttered about. 

The late veeries and robins were singing, 
and the warm fragrance of the apple-blos- 
soms was all about us, as we gathered our 
treasures together and drove home in the 
dusk. 



CHAPTER VIII 

RIDGEFIELD, AND WEIR'S 
MILLS 

The two adjoining districts of Ridgefield 
and Weir's Mills lie about ten miles to the 
east of us, in level and fertile farm country, 
between two ridges of hills. Ridgefield is 
an old Roman Catholic settlement. Twenty- 
five years ago it still had a prosperous con- 
vent, and children educated in the convent 
school have gone out all over the country; but 
the centre of the farming population shifted, 
and at last the convent was closed. The 
cheerful-faced, black-gowned sisters are all 
gone. The bell has been silent for years now, 
and its tower stands up with blank windows, 
nothing more than a strange landmark in the 
open farming landscape. 

The Ridgefield Irish were a noted com- 
munity. They all came from one county, 
and were marked to a surprising degree by 

their personal beauty. There were Esmonds 

82 



RIDGEFIELD, AND WEIR'S MILLS 83 

and Desmonds, Considines, Burkes, and Mc- 
Canns, and two names now gone (except for 
one old representative) Guilfoyles and Guil- 
shannons. Four lovely Esmond girls of one 
family are now growing up, bearing four 
saints' names — Agatha, Ursula, Patricia, 
Cecily. 

Honoria Considine walks down our street, 
beautiful creature that she is, with a port 
and carriage that a princess might envy. 
She has brought up an orphaned nephew and 
niece to capability and prosperity, support- 
ing them entirely by her sewing. The Con- 
sidines have possessions which show that they 
came to this country as something more than 
farmers. They have a little old silver, two 
finely inlaid card-tables in the farm '' best- 
room," and two larger mahogany tables. 
They are great prohibitionists, and would be 
shocked, good souls, to know that what they 
call the " old refrigerator " is a beautifully 
carved wine-cooler! 

Lawrence McCann and Joe Fitzgerald were 
two as handsome creatures as ever were 
seen, with great dark blue eyes, delicate 
brows, dark curls, and mantling Irish color. 



84 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

Lawrence died of consumption at twenty- 
four, as did his cousin, delightful Con Guil- 
shannon, but Joe did well and married. The 
other day I saw him out walking with three 
little rosy children, all with penciled eyebrows 
and very dark blue eyes. 

There lives an old lady in a great western 
city (I don't give its name) who ought to 
wear a crown instead of a bonnet. The town 
trembles before her masterful benevolence. 
Her magnificent house dominates the '' best 
community," and her six middle-aged mar- 
ried children, established near-by in houses of 
equal magnificence, do not dare call their 
souls their own. 

A neighbor of mine was in her city last 
year, and was taken to see her. The old 
lady seemed to know an amazing amount, 
not only about our far-away eastern State, 
but about our actual county. She finally 
showed such an absorbing interest in par- 
ticular households that my friend said: 

"But how can you know? How can you 
have heard about so-and-so?" 

" Child," said the old chieftainess, her fine 
eyes twinkling and filling, " My name is no 



RIDGEFIELD, AND WEIR'S MILLS 85 

guide to you now, except that it's Irish, but 
I was born and brought up in your county. 
I was an Esmond from Ridgefield, and had 
my schooling at the convent, not six miles 
from your door." 

After Ridgefield, with its deserted convent, 
you come presently to where the rolling coun- 
try is suddenly flung amazingly apart in the 
chasm-like valley of the Winding River. 
Weir's Mills, the village at the head of navi- 
gation, is a pleasant peaceful little place, 
a very old settlement, with a noted old church. 

A neighbor of ours, a man now of eighty, has 
told me that in his childhood at Weir's Mills, 
the school had neither paper nor blackboard 
nor slates for the children to write on. The 
teacher smoothed the ashes of the hearth- 
stone out flat with a shingle, and the children 
did their figuring on that. Farmers going 
into town chalked the figures of their sales 
on their beaver hats, and the assessor chalked 
the taxes up on the doors. 

The school-teachers were taken to board 
in turn, two weeks at a time, by different 
families; and a friend, now an elderly woman, 
has told me that when teaching, as a young 



86 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

girl, she had as a rule to share her bed with 
three or four children of the family. In sev- 
eral places the hens slept in the room too. 
The schools of course were ungraded. After 
her teaching hours she helped in the house- 
work, but she liked it, and made warm 
friends. She found the life vigorous and 
hardy — " It was life that was every bit of 
it alive," she has told me. 

It is sometimes said that marriage and 
divorce are taken lightly in the country dis- 
tricts, and certainly the Jingroes and their 
like, of whom more later, make their gipsy 
marriages, which bind only at will; but even 
among some of our outlying communities of 
far higher standing than the forest settle- 
ments, it is true that a curious, primitive view 
of wedlock often obtains. Marriages in the 
country are deep as the rock, enduring as the 
hills, once the real mate is found. The fine, 
toil-worn faces of man and wife, in Golden- 
Wedding and Four-generations groups in 
local newspapers, show a thing before which 
one puts off the shoes from off one's feet. 
But, when husband and wife find only misery 
in their marriage, find themselves fundament- 



RIDGEFIELD, AND WEIR'S MILLS 87 

ally at variance, they quietly " get a bill," (/. e. 
of divorce,) and each is considered free to 
marry again. The adjustment, according to 
their lights, is made decently and in order; and 
all cases come quickly before the final court of 
public opinion, which in these clear-eyed coun- 
try districts metes out an inexorable judgment 
to lightness, to cowardice or selfishness. 

It is difficult not to mis-state, about so 
subtle a matter; but the attitude of these 
neighborhoods is not a lax one. It is rather 
as if, in places so small, where the margin 
of everything is so narrow, the tremendous 
exigencies of life enforce a tolerance which 
is no conscious action of men's minds, but a 
thing larger than themselves, before which 
they must bow. Life is so simple and 
vital, so cleared by necessity of a million 
extraneous complexities, that people are able, 
as one of the Saints says, to judge the action 
by the person, not the person by the action. 

Long ago there was plenty of shipping 
direct from Weir's Mills to Boston, and even 
to-day scows, and a few small schooners, 
come up between the hills for hay and wood, 
up all the windings of the Winding River, 



88 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

slipping through the draws at the peaceful, 
pretty hamlets of Upper, Middle, and Lower 
Bridge. 

The country about Weir's Mills shows in 
indefinable ways that you are approaching the 
sea. You get the taste of salt, with a south 
wind, more often than with us. The roads 
show sandy, and you see an occasional clump 
of sweet bay in the pastures. The pines grow 
more and more dwarfed, and so maritime in 
look that you expect to see blue water and 
the masts of ships ten miles before you come 
to them. We came on another indication one 
day, in asking our way of a young girl at a 
farm door. 

" The second turn to the west," she told us. 
In our part of the county we do not often 
think of the points of the compass. " The 
second turn on your left," it would have 
been. 

This is one of our older districts, and a 
certain amount of old-fashioned speech re- 
mains. Many persons still speak of ninepence 
(twelve and a half cents) and a shilling (six- 
teen and two-thirds cents). A High School 
pupil (one of the many boys who walk 



RIDGEFIELD, AND WEIR'S MILLS 89 

three or four miles in to our Town, in all 
weathers, to get their schooling) brought in 
some Mountain Ash berries to the botanical 
class. Round-Tree berries, he called them, 
and the master was puzzled, until he realized 
that this meant Rowan Tree, and that the 
name had come down straight from the boy's 
English forefathers, who picked the rowan 
berries by their home streams. 

All through our county, and in our Town 
itself, among the homelier neighbors, many 
of the old strong preterites, which have be- 
come obsolete elsewhere, are still in use. " I 
wed the garden," for " I weeded," " I bet the 
carpet"; riz for raised, hove for heaved; and 
among our old established families of sub- 
stance you may still hear shew for showed and 
dim for climbed. 

" I dim a little ways up into the rigging," 
one of our magnates said to me this very 
week, speaking of an adventure of his sea- 
faring youth. 

After the Revolution certain of the un- 
fortunate Hessians drifted to the southern 
part of our county, and being stranded, poor 
souls, they made the best of it, settled and 



90 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

married. They named our town of Dresden. 
The Theobalds come from this Hessian stock, 
the Vannahs, who started as Werners, the 
Dockendorffs, and we have a precious al- 
though extremely local sea-shore name, JVin- 
kiepaWf which began life as Wenckebach. 
But the adaptation of surnames is in process 
all around us. Uriah Briery's people used to 
be Brieryhurst; and Samuel Powers has told 
me that his grandfather wrote his name in 
*' a queer Frenchy sort of way, he spelled it 
de la Poer" (!) The Goslines, of whom we 
have a good sized family, were du Gueslins, 
not long since, and Alec Duffy, who sounds 
entirely Irish, was born Alexis D'Urfee. 

A queer old person lived on the Weir's 
Mills road when we were children. He had 
prospered in farming and trade, and was 
quite a rich man for those parts. He wanted 
to be richer still, and all his last years he 
was ridden by two chimerical dreams; one, 
that a piece of his land was to be bought 
for a monster hotel, at a fabulous price, and 
the other that Captain Kidd's treasure was 
buried in a small island he owned in the 
river. He dug and he dug for it. He had 



RIDGEFIELD, AND WEIR'S MILLS 91 

absolute faith in the superstition that a fork 
of green wood — perhaps of witch-hazel only, 
but I am not sure about this — held firmly in 
both hands, will point straight to buried water 
or buried treasure. He has led us all over his 
island, holding the forked stick. 

"There! See him! See him turn!" he 
would cry out excitedly. " Wild oxen won't 
hold him!" The stick certainly turned in 
his hands, and in ours, when he placed it 
right for us. I suppose the wood is so elastic 
and springy that, holding it in a certain way 
you unconsciously turn it yourself; but it 
gave a queer feeling. 

This whole district is fragrant with the 
memory of a saint, Mary Scott. She was 
a cripple her whole life. Her shoulders and 
the upper part of her body were those of a 
powerful woman, but her feet and legs were 
those of a child, and were withered and use- 
less. She lived all alone when I knew her, 
in a tiny neat house. She spent her days in 
a child's cart, which she could move about 
by the wheels with her hands, and she was 
most active and busy. 

No one could go through a life of such 



92 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

affliction without untellable suffering; but 
Mary's sweet faith never seemed to know that 
she had a self at all, still less a crippled self. 
She had quick skillful hands, and her absorb- 
ing pleasure all through the year was her 
work for her Christmas tree. She saved, and 
her neighbors saved for her, every bit of tin- 
foil and silver or gold paper that could be 
found, and fashioned out of it bright stars and 
spangles for trimming. She knitted and 
knitted, mittens and stockings and com- 
forters, and when the time came near she 
made candy, and corn-balls, and strung pop- 
corn into garlands. The neighbors all helped 
her, and good Jacob Damren, at Tresump- 
scott, always cut her a tree from his woods 
and set it up for her; and then on Christmas 
Eve the door of her cottage stood open, and 
the light streamed out from the bright 
lighted tree, and the children of the whole 
district came thronging in with their parents. 
The tributary streams from this eastern 
side of our river come in very quietly. Wor- 
romontogus, the largest, is dammed just as 
it emerges from its hills, to turn the Wil- 
sons' saw-mill, which was once owned and 



RIDGEFIELD, AND WEIR'S MILLS 93 

run by Mary Scott's father. The mill and 
mill-pond are in an open, sunny pocket of 
the woods. The winding lane which leads 
in to them is bordered with elms and willows, 
and the road is soft underfoot with bark and 
saw-dust. Feathery elms stand all about the 
stream's basin, and after you have followed the 
road in you reach the weather-stained mill, the 
logs, the new-cut lumber, as fragrant as can 
be, and the great heap of bright-colored saw- 
dust. Worromontogus drains the pond of 
the same name, five miles long, some distance 
back in the country. 



CHAPTER IX 
MARY GUILFOYLE 

The sun had come out bright after a rain, 
and every leaf was shining, the June day 
when we drove over to Ridgefield to fetch 
Mary Guilfoyle. We started early in the 
morning, but it was already like noon in that 
midsummer season. Daisies were powdering 
the fields, as white as snow, and yellow and 
orange hawkweeds were growing in among 
them, so that whole fields showed yellow, 
orange, and white. The orange hawkweed is 
very fragrant, and its sweetness mixed with 
the spicy bitterness of the daisies. Then, on 
a knoll as the road rose above the river, we 
found patches of bright blue lupins in the 
yellow and orange and white, making such a 
blaze of color as I have never seen before 
in our northern fields. 

There were streaks of crimson sorrel in 
the fields where there were no daisies, among 
the ripening June-grass and red-top; all 

94 



MARY GUILFOYLE 95 

the grasses, and the fields of grain, were be- 
ginning to turn a little tawny, and quick 
waves chased each other across them with 
the light summer wind. 

Mary lives in a scrap of a new house, in a 
thick wood of young firs and spruces. The 
last mile of our road led through these sweet- 
smelling trees, which were set all over with 
light green jewels of new growth. Grass 
grew in the ruts, and the moist earth of the 
wood road was thronged with yellow butter- 
flies; and tiny "blues," like bits of the sky 
come to life, fluttered among the ferns. 
Breath after breath of sweetness came from 
the warm woods in the sunshine. 

Mary was waiting for us at the door, with 
her knitting in her hand, and her cat at her 
skirts. Her small rough fields across the road 
were ploughed and planted, and she was ready 
to come to us. She is a strongly built old 
woman with bright blue eyes and yellowish 
gray hair, sturdy as a weather-beaten piece 
of white-oak timber. Many is the time that 
she has left our house of an afternoon (in our 
impossible spring going, too, with the frost 
coming out of the ground and the mud a foot 



96 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

deep) ; walked out to her farm, six full miles, 
seen to some detail of farm-work that worried 
her, and walked back, arriving before seven 
the next morning, to cook our breakfast. 

She works on her farm all summer, planting 
and hoeing her corn and beans and potatoes. 
She has help from the men of the neighbor- 
hood when she can get it, but I believe she 
follows the plough herself when she is put to 
it. In winter she comes into town, and works 
for households in difficulties. If the cook 
deserts us, or we have a sudden influx of 
guests or everyone has grippe, we send for 
Mary Guilfoyle and she sees us through. She 
comes into a house like a blast of clear air. 
Nothing ruffles her, and her mere presence 
seems to return its right proportions and 
gayety to life. She knows how to work as 
few people do nowadays, and she is so sound- 
hearted and unafraid that there is something 
royal and powerful about her. 

Mary's mother was French, and it is from 
her she gets her gestures. Her hands move 
finely, with a dignity and control a duchess 
might envy, and they say more than mere 
words could. And then, her funny expres- 



MARY GUILFOYLE 97 

sions! She is a Roman Catholic, but so far 
from being a church-goer that I was sur- 
prised, last Easter morning, at seeing her 
ready for church; and my surprise was re- 
buked with, 

" Child, the heretic and the hangman go 
to church on this morning!" 

Her speech is unlike anybody else's. Every 
sentence is vivid, but they lose their quaint 
flavor in telling. She is delighted (she is a 
fine cook), but excited, too, at getting a 
" company meal," and loses her appetite. 

" The cook cannot eat, not if she were at 
the gates of heaven, at these times," she 
puts it. 

She was telling one day of an unfortunate 
young farm neighbor — 

'' He knelt on a nail, and took lock-jaw. 
They hoisted him to Portland, but it warn't 
of no use. He died in four days. He was a 
beautiful young man. Warn't it terrible?" 

Somehow I never fail to see the poor youth 
caught up in a sheet and swung through the 
air the whole journey. 

Mary was born and brought up in the 
Catholic community at Ridgefield; but she 



98 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

has spent little time there. Fifty-five years 
ago, when she was sixteen, she learned fine 
sewing and clear-starching at the Great 
House of our neighborhood, and then nothing 
would do but she must seek her fortune in 
Boston, where she already had two sisters 
in service. She made the voyage in a sailing 
vessel, a small brig laden with hay. She 
found out the name of a first-rate dressmaker, 
in Temple Place; next she bought a piece of 
fine gray cashmere, and cut and made herself 
a jacket and dress. Then she presented her- 
self. 

" How do I know you are a seamstress at 
all?" the dressmaker asked. 

'' I cut and made every stitch I have on 
me." 

** You may go right upstairs, at seven dol- 
lars a week, with the others." 

A sweep of the hand illustrated the tri- 
umph; seven dollars was fine pay in those 
days. 

One of her sisters was cook for many 
years for Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

(** A little man, the face wrinkled " — and 
Mary's eloquent hands made me see the Doc- 



MARY GUILFOYLE 99 

tor again in person.) He took care of her 
money for her; and Mary has often told 
me how one day, after many years, he said, 

*' Now, Anna, you are a rich woman; you 
need never work again, and can do what you 
like." 

She bought a nice little house in one of 
the suburbs. 

" But a year was all she could stand of it. 
She couldn't make out to live, away from the 
Holmeses, and back she goes to them." 

Mary married at twenty, and lived quietly 
in Chelsea for five and twenty years. Then 
her husband died, and instead of going home 
to the farm, or staying on where she was, to 
take boarders, this born adventurer was off 
to see the world. 

" I hadn't seen, not one thing, cooped up 
there in Chelsea. I wanted to find out about 
new things, and new places, whilst I was 
strong." 

She took a part of her savings, sewed up in 
the front of her gown, to fall back on, but 
her capable hands were the real funds on 
which she depended. She traveled to Denver, 
and there went out to service, and after- 



100 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

wards worked in a restaurant. She found light 
work in plenty, and in between jobs took her 
heart's fill of sight-seeing. She saw Pike's 
Peak and the Grand Canyon. By the end 
of the winter she had earned enough to take 
her to San Francisco. Here she had a sister- 
and brother-in-law who ran a good restaurant, 
and Mary joined forces with them. A year 
brim-full of life followed, but after this her 
two own sisters, her only surviving near rela- 
tions, fell ill, and she came home to nurse 
them. It was then that she bought her farm, 
near her old home in Ridgefield, planning that 
the three should spend their old age together. 
Both sisters, though, died; but my indomi- 
table Mary keeps the farm almost as well as 
a man could, and her strong nature, tre- 
mendously intent on the present moment, 
never feels loneliness. 

As I said, she is not much of a church-goer, 
but she is devout in her own way, and plans 
to go back to San Francisco, to the convent 
where a cousin of hers is now Abbess, and 
there 

" Get ready to die ; and a good thing to do, 
too, first-rate! " 



MARY GUILFOYLE loi 

I never knew anyone so indifferent about 
dress as Mary; she is quite pretty in her way, 
and must always have been so, but she 
puts on whatever is nearest at hand, and will 
hamper her least. It is a fact that I saw her 
out in the rain the other day, taking in clothes 
from the line, with a length of brown oil- 
cloth tied about her stout person, by way of 
an apron, with marline, and an empty 
shredded-wheat box, split up on one side, on 
her head for a hat. 

The lower meadows were still yellow with 
the gold of buttercups as we drove home, 
and where the swales ran lower and richer 
we saw tall Canada Lilies, Loose-strife, and 
purple and white fringed orchids, in among 
the Meadow-rue, and light green ferns and 
ripening grasses. There was Blue-eyed 
Grass, too, and Iris. It was all rich and 
fragrant, and butterflies were hovering about 
the lilies; and as if this were not enough, a 
breath of woodsy sweetness, much like the 
fragrance of Lady's Slippers, met us from a 
mixed meadow and cranberry bog, and there 
were flocks of rose-pink Arethusas all deli- 
cately poised among the grasses. 



102 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

Meadow-larks were rising all about, singing 
their piercingly sweet notes. The children 
were picking wild strawberries, and the black- 
berries flung out long springing sprays down 
the perfected June roadways. Their blossoms 
are very like small single sweet-briar roses. 



CHAPTER X 
TRESUMPSCOTT POND 

Tresumpscott Pond lies three miles east- 
ward from our river, set deep between the 
folds of wooded and rocky hills, and the 
woods frame it close. 

You climb the rise of a long slow-mounting 
hill which at its southern extremity breaks 
sharply down in granite ledges, mostly pine- 
covered, and there right below you lies this 
little lonely, perfectly guarded lake. There 
is only one opening in the woods, a farm 
which slopes down to the shore in two wide 
fields, with a low rambling farm-house. There 
is no other roof in sight. 

The pond is about a mile long and half as 

wide. It has the attributes of a big lake, in 

little; deep bays up which loons nest, and 

wooded headlands, ending in smooth abrupt 

rocks which enclose small curved beaches of 

white sand, as firm and fine as sea sand. 

The western bay ends in a river of swamp, 

103 



104 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

and all along the north side the wood screens 
a broken wall of fern-grown clififs, with quan- 
tities of columbines among their crannies. 
The long slope above the woods is a sheep 
pasture, partly under pines and partly open, 
with ledge and cinquefoil-covered boulders 
cropping out in the close turf, and tall 
mulleins standing all about like candle- 
sticks. 

The whole locality is rich in treasures, and 
here on the north side of the pond is a stretch 
of mossy glades and openings in the under- 
wood which are covered with the fairy ele- 
gance of maiden-hair fern, the delicate black 
stems standing out against the rocks and 
moss. They grow under cool rich woods, 
with pink Lady's Slippers scattered in clumps 
among them. 

The farm at Tresumpscott is an ample one, 
and Jacob Damren, who farms it, comes of 
fine stock, and is a big, hearty figure of a 
man. The Pond was his father's before him. 
His wife is a plain little woman, always 
clean and trim in fresh cotton print. They 
say her habitual sadness is because she has 
never liked the Pond. She was town-bred, and 



TRESUMPSCOTT POND 105 

finds it utterly lonely, while to Jacob it holds 
everything that earth can give. 

The land is very fertile and they prospered 
till well past middle life, when Jacob met with 
an accident that was hard to bear. A neg- 
lected cut on his thumb became infected, 
and soon there was swelling and pain in the 
whole hand. No one did the right thing, no 
one knew what to do beyond the old-fash- 
ioned farm treatments, and after a week of 
fever the arm had to go. They said it was 
only his wife's despairing weeping which 
brought him at last to consent to amputation. 
At first he begged to be allowed to die sooner 
than face life again thus maimed. 

He met the blow, once it fell, in a steady 
manly way, and now has come well out 
from under its shadow. A month ago I saw 
him out with his horse and drag, getting out 
stumps, and he was managing this trouble- 
some business successfully. He smiled a 
patient, slow smile, as we came up. 

*' This comes kind of awkward for a one- 
armed man!" he called out, but spoke 
cheerily, and seemed delighted at the way he 
was achieving his stumping. 



io6 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

They have had other troubles. A son who 
lived at home and shared the farm, married 
a shallow, heartless girl, who left him, and 
so broke his heart and his whole hold on life 
that he could not bear the place without her, 
and has led a wandering, broken sort of ex- 
istence since. Their other boy, though, is a 
good son indeed. He is part owner in a small 
cooperage and he drives over from week to 
week, puts in solid help on the farm, and 
brings his wife and babies to make cheerful 
Sundays for the old people. 

Jacob and his wife love animals. The last 
time I was over there the cosset lamb came 
into the kitchen to ask for milk. Mrs. Damren 
was caressing two new red calves as if they 
were kittens, while Flora, Jacob's foxhound, 
and her two velvet-skinned, soft-eyed puppies 
played round them. 

We drive over to the pond from time to time 
for swamp treasures of different kinds. Jacob 
has a tumble-down, lichen-covered boathouse 
where water-pewees and white-bellied swal- 
lows nest, in which he keeps a few of the worst 
boats in the world (with ash oars shaped like 
flattened poles and heavy as lead), ajid lets 



TRESUMPSCOTT POND 107 

them out to people who come for pickerel or 
water-lilies. The whole western end of the 
pond is a laughing expanse of water-lilies and 
yellow Beaver Lilies, with the bright yellow 
butterfly-shaped blossoms of bladderwort in 
among them. Beyond these you come to a 
mixture of floating islands, tussocks, intricate 
channels of black water, and stretches of 
shaking cotton grass, which in June and July 
hide a host of slim-stemmed rose-colored 
swamp orchids, Arethusa, calopogon, and 
pogonia. You pole and shove your boat 
between the floating islands, submerging or- 
chids and cotton-grasses alike in the black 
peat water, and beyond them reach the parti- 
colored velvet of the peat bog itself. 

Balsam fir grows here, sweet rush and 
sweet gale, and quantities of Labrador Tea, 
with shining dark leaves (of which Thoreau 
made tea when camping on Chesuncook) and 
masses of delicate-stamened white flowers, 
which give out a warm resinous sweetness. 
All around there is the general bog fragrance 
of sphagnum and water-lilies, and the woodsy 
perfume of the rose-colored orchids. 

Farther in shore, among the balsam firs. 



io8 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

the growth dwindles to a general velvety 
richness of gem-like green and crimson 
mosses, blueberries, and cranberries and 
huckleberries, the large handsome maroon- 
crimson flowers of the Pitcher-Plant, and the 
little bright-yellow-flowered Sundew, getting 
its nourishment from the insects caught in its 
sticky crimson filaments. 

The pond is alive all summer v\^ith butter- 
flies and birds. We spent a day there in June, 
and tried to follow a pair of Carolina rails, 
which ran and hid among the cotton-grasses, 
and ran again, and suddenly vanished as com- 
pletely as if they had melted in air. We put 
up a bittern, but did not find her nest. Scores 
of red-wing black-birds had nested in the clus- 
tered bushes of the floating islands. We laid 
our oars down on the shaking cotton grass 
as a sort of bridge and worked our way from 
island to island, while a perfect cloud of birds 
chuckled and wheeled round us, uttering 
their guttural warning cries and their fresh 
" Hock-a-lees ! " We looked into three red- 
wings' nests, and one king-bird's, all with 
eggs. The red-wing's eggs were pale blue, 
scratched and blotched with black as if by 



TRESUMPSCOTT POND 109 

a child playing with ink and pen, while the 
king-bird's were a beautiful cream-color, 
marked in a circle round the large end with 
rich brown blotches. 

As we went on to gather Pitcher-Plants and 
Sundew, we saw an eagle fishing over the 
lonely little lake; saw, too, a thing I have 
never seen before or since, for he caught a 
fish so big it pulled him under. He vanished 
out of sight completely, came up with a great 
flap, and, making heavy work of it, and flying 
so low he almost touched the water, he made 
off and gained the woods with his prize. 

Besides our orchids and pitcher-plants (we 
washed the pitchers clear of insects, and 
drank from them), we had come for stickle- 
backs, which are found in the clear shallows 
by one of the small beaches. We had a net, 
and glass jars. They are such quick darting 
creatures that it is hard to get them. They 
are the liveliest of all pets for an aquarium, 
and prosper very fairly in captivity. 

Early in the morning, when we first reached 
the pond, the bobolinks were rising and sing- 
ing all over the lower water meadows, and 
the mists were turning to silver in the early 



no A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

sunlight. When we came up from the bog 
in the late afternoon the bobolinks were silent, 
but a mother sand-peep wheeled and cried 
about the field, afraid that we would find her 
chickens. 

We cooled our hands and faces in the clear 
water and washed off the black peat mold, 
and went up to the farm. Mrs. Damren had 
fresh gingerbread for us, and creamy milk, 
and we sat round a table with a cheerful red 
cloth. The room was very homelike, with a 
good deal of dark wood, and bright pots and 
pans. A shot-gun and a rifle hung over the 
mantel, the guns poor Jacob will never use 
again. His hunting dog sat close to his chair. 

The wife's sorrowful eyes turned always 
to her husband, but seemed at the same time 
to try to guard his empty sleeve from our 
glances. He, with a larger patience, was 
unconscious of it. 

They told us a good thing; that two lads, 
sons of a minister in a neighboring town, 
have built a little camp in Jacob's woods. 
They come over often to spend the night, and 
sometimes stay a week, and are great com- 
pany. They come to Jacob for milk, butter, 



TRESUMPSCOTT POND iii 

and eggs, and often spend the evening. The 
week before they had shot two coons, and 
they are busy mounting them, under his 
directions. 

Jacob's face has a great peace in it, that 
of a man who has given everything in him 
to the place he lives in, and held nothing back. 
His beautiful, lonely little holding of wood 
and field and lake is better, for the work he 
has put into it, than when his father left it to 
him. He has cleared more fields, enriched the 
land, and drained the lower meadows. His 
son will have it after him. I have seldom seen 
a place which seemed more entirely home. 

Jacob had cut the hay in his upper meadow 
early (he has to take his son's or a neighbor's 
help when he can get it), and it was already 
piled in sweet-smelling haycocks as we drove 
by, but the water meadows, where the purple 
fringed orchids and loosestrife grow in 
among the grasses, were still uncut. It was 
dusk, and the fireflies were out. Thousands 
of them flashed their soft radiance low over 
the perfumed meadow, and the fragrance of 
sweet rush and of the open water came to 
us from the lake. 



CHAPTER XI 

IN THE TRESUMPSCOTT 
WOODS 

The population of a district can never be 
classified. Once again, " folks are folks," and 
the smallest hamlet shows infinite variety. Yet 
here and there the individual quality of a 
neighborhood seems as marked as that of the 
different belts and communities of trees which 
clothe the land about it. 

Watson's Hill, Ridgefield, and Weir's Mills 
are fine up-standing neighborhoods, with good 
houses, big barns, fresh paint, and bright milk 
cans catching the sun; but in near-by folds of 
the hills, where the ridges slope up into higher 
country, there are poor and scattered farms 
and farm-houses which are no more than 
shanties. A neighborhood six miles from a 
big town may be more rustic than another 
twice as far. It is partly the soil, partly in- 
heritance, and surely it is a third part influ- 
ence. The land of our Silvester's Mills 



IN THE TRESUMPSCOTT WOODS 113 

Quakers is not specially good, but the im- 
pulse imparted by three or four industrious 
good families is the foundation of its marked 
prosperity. 

A Swede and an Italian have lately taken 
up two farms which were considered quite 
run out, one in North Ridgefield, six miles 
from us, and the other at the top of a long 
hill on the Tresumpscott Road. 

The Swede asked William Pender, a thin, 
vague, grumbling man, of whom he hired 
the land, 

" How long time to clear these fields of 
stones? " 

"Ninety-nine years!" said William sol- 
emnly. But the Swede, a fair, strong-built 
man named Jansen, went to work, with his 
wife and his three children. They put on 
leather aprons, and worked early and late, 
in every spare minute that could be taken 
from planting and cultivating. (William 
looked on, from his brother's farm, whither 
he had retreated, in a mixture of incredulity, 
disapprobation and envy.) They worked in 
the rain; and now, after three years, the farm 
is clear of stones, and Jansen owns it clear. 



114 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

He has a thousand hens, and sells his eggs 
and broilers at fancy prices in New York; 
and Mrs. Jansen's lawn and flower-beds are 
as gay as those of a neat farm in Holland. 

The Italian farmer is a larger pattern of 
man. He came here as a young fellow with 
no better start than a push-cart, but he came 
of good intelligent Tuscan people, and has 
not only endless industry, but wits to see, and 
enterprise to take, all sorts of chances. He did 
not take any chances, though, when he mar- 
ried Alice Farrell, the daughter of one of our 
best farmers, a strong pretty girl, as indus- 
trious as her husband, and even more intelli- 
gent, with a free sort of outlook, and some- 
thing kindling about her. Her husband is 
now the big man of his neighborhood. The 
district goes by his name, and he has rep- 
resented it in the Legislature. He owns a 
fine herd of registered Guernseys, and his 
apples bring fancy prices. 

A friend of mine, a farmer, once asked one 
of the great Connecticut nurserymen to what 
he attributed the success of the Italians in 
nursery work and truck farming. The older 
man's eyes twinkled. 



IN THE TRESUMPSCOTT WOODS 115 

" I'll tell you," he said. " They're willing 
to work in the rain!" 

Our farm conditions are improving, almost 
while you watch them. The Agricultural De- 
partment of the State University is doing 
yeoman service. People are beginning to 
realize what science is bringing to agriculture, 
and the young men are fired by it. They are 
especially beginning to realize what ignorance 
it was to leave so many farms deserted, and 
to condemn so much of the land as hopeless 
and used up. The friend who asked the ques- 
tion about the Italians said of our own farmers: 

" They stick to their grandfathers' ways, 
and not to their grandfathers' enterprise and. 
ambition for improvement." But this state- 
ment is fast coming to be untrue. 

Interspersed, however, among the prosper- 
ous districts there are curious, backward ham- 
lets, where the woods seem to encroach. 
Their hills shut them about too closely. Some 
set of the tide of human affairs, some change 
of transportation or of market, cuts off the 
wholesome currents of life from them, and 
they stagnate like cut-off water and become 
degenerate. 



ii6 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

There is a sad combination of receding 
prosperity and a run-out population in a town 
a long day's drive from us. Poor place, it has 
become bankrupt. Its timber was cut off, and 
the cooperages, on which its tiny livelihood 
depended, moved away. Its farms straggle 
up the flanks of a round-topped mountain. 
Apple-raising might perhaps have saved it, 
but either such of its people as had the enter- 
prise for this moved away, or it possessed 
none such. The people I saw there looked 
as different as possible from our hearty sun- 
and-air neighbors. Unkempt faces thronged 
the dirty windows of farms that were mere 
shacks. They looked at once ambitionless and 
sinister. " Merricktown folks," people of the 
neighboring districts say, when tools dis- 
appear or robes are stolen from the sleighs 
at a Grange supper. 

No Indians are left in our part of the world; 
but here and there a family shows marked 
traces of Indian blood, as old Sile Taylor, 
beyond Watson's Hill, a frowsy and hospit- 
able patriarch, whose little black eyes twinkle 
with a kind of foxy kindliness. Though none 
dwell here, Indians come two or three 



IN THE TRESUMPSCOTT WOODS 117 

times a year from the State Reservation, 
with snow-shoes, moccasins, and sweet-grass 
baskets to sell. They make a yearly pilgrim- 
age to the seashore for the sweet-grass, which 
grows in the salt meadows at the mouths of 
a few rivers. They cut and dry it, and carry 
home many hundred pounds for the winter's 
weaving. The Gabriel brothers, Joe and Bill, 
are regular visitors among us, enormous dark 
men, with that Indian habit of silence which 
implies not so much taciturnity, as a certain 
tranquil quality. Tranquillity and kindness 
seem to flow from the big brothers. They 
seem untroubled by any need of speech. 

Then beyond Rattlesnake Hill there are the 
"Jingroes." They are credited with being 
pure-blooded gipsies, and they certainly look 
it. I do not know whether they started with 
a definite Mr. and Mrs. Jingroe or not. The 
name is applied to the whole tribe. They 
live *' over back," in clearings in a wide belt 
of forest. They are perfectly indolent, but 
cheerful, and content with the most primitive 
farming. 

Once in a while, when things go hard with 
them, they all set to work, and weave very 



iiB A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

good baskets, which they bring in town to 
sell. You are met at every street corner by 
handsome, dark-eyed Mrs. Jingroes, in ker- 
chief and bright earrings, importuning every 
passer-by to buy a basket. 

About once a year a gipsy caravan drives 
through our town, and stops in the street 
on its way. The slim, handsome barefooted 
children and their dark square-built mothers 
are all about. The women bustle from shop 
to shop, making small purchases, and pick up 
a little money by telling fortunes. 

Once, when the gipsies camped in a rough 
pasture near town, one of the children died, 
and a touching deputation came, to ask per- 
mission (which was of course given) to bury 
it in the town cemetery. 

Another time, as a caravan drove through 
the town, I noticed a girl lying at the back 
of one of the flimsy, covered wagons, so ill 
she seemed to be unconscious. She was a 
lovely creature, dark and pale, and her slim 
body swayed and shook with the shaking of 
the wheels. I wanted to call out to the 
drivers to stop, but the crazy caravan rattled 
away at a half-canter, and paid no attention. 



IN THE TRESUMPSCOTT WOODS 119 

Tresumpscott Pond lies in the midst of our 
most heavily forested district. There is no 
village or hamlet near it, but a handful of 
little farms, on tiny clearings or no clearings 
at all, are scattered through the woods. 

The dwellers in these forest farms are not 
people of substance, like the farmers of the 
open country near them, but they are intelli- 
gent folk, and are rich in the treasure of a 
varied and interesting life. The men of the 
family are sure to have hunting coats and 
gaiters, — leather or canvas; good guns, which 
they keep well oiled and bright; and most of 
them keep a good fox hound or two, whose 
jubilant music may be heard as they range 
through the winter woods with their masters, 
or on independent hunting excursions. The 
boys begin by seven years old to have trap- 
ping enterprises of their own up the little 
quick forest brooks, and what looks to the 
ordinary person like the merest mossy run- 
nel, hardly a brook at all, may be well known 
as a drinking-place of coons, or a haunt where 
sharp eyes may see a mink. They are sent out 
to gather thoroughwort, dill, dock, and other 
simples, and mosses and roots for the farm 



I20 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

dyeing. {Cruttles, or crottles^ the farm name 
for the dark moss growing on ash-trees, makes 
a fine yellow dye.) They know where to lie 
hidden at half past three in the morning 
on the chance of seeing a deer, and under 
which stretch of lily-pads is the best chance 
for a pickerel. And not only the boys: I 
know a girl on a farm, whose grown-up 
brother has such confidence in her marksman- 
ship, that he will shake an apple-tree, while 
she nicks the falling apples with her rifle. 
They make use of a far greater number of 
wild plants than are known to the farmers 
of the more open country, as " greens," cook- 
ing and eating young milk-weed stalks, shep- 
herd's purse, and the uncurling fronds of the 
Osmundas and other great ferns, which they 
call '' fiddle-heads." 

They grow up sinewy and alert, under this 
eager life, and the best of them attain, beside 
their farm knowledge, to the undefinable 
huntsman's knowledge, which sets its mark 
on a man. Their bearing is confident and 
fearless, and with it they have a certain forest 
quality on which it is hard to lay a finger. 
It is noticeable that the greater part of the 



IN THE TRESUMPSCOTT WOODS 121 

families who cleave to this forest way of life 
are apt to be of dark complexion. It is a great 
pity that most of them can get so little 
schooling, but they have all been educated, 
since they were little, in a training which 
certainly develops and intensifies some of 
man's best powers. 

The deep tranquil woods cover the rise 
and fall of the ridges for a good stretch of 
miles, and a good deal of hunting and trap- 
ping is to be had in them. Last month we 
came on fresh raccoon tracks, like prints of 
little hands, in the leaf mould of the wood 
road, and coons are often shot here. One 
day, as we were walking, there was a great 
growling and barking from our dogs, and 
we found that they had treed a porcupine. 

In my Grandfather's time, sheep had to 
be driven at night to the tops of the hills, 
because of the bears in the Tresumpscott 
woods; and only two years ago there was an 
outcry among the farmers because sheep were 
being killed. Everybody watched his neigh- 
bor's dog, but Oliver Newcomb, who lives on 
a little farm in the heart of the forest tract, 
coming home at dusk up the wood road, 



122 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

heard a growling and snarling, and came on 
a great Bay Lynx, the only one seen in this 
part of the country for many years. Oliver 
is a man who is almost never seen without 
his gun, and he shot the marauder, and got 
twenty-five dollars for the skin, a real wind- 
fall for a young man on a small forest farm, 
with wife to keep and five children. The skin 
was mounted, and set up in the library of the 
Soldiers' Home. 

The Bay Lynx is a much longer, more 
panther-like creature than our common 
Canada Lynx (the Loup Cervier or Bob-cat), 
and is of a general bay color, not unlike that 
of the Mountain Lion of the West. I have 
wondered if this might not be the panther 
or " painter " which was the terror of our 
Northern woods to early settlers. 

" Big Game " has increased greatly in our 
State of late years, partly from the enforce- 
ment of strict game laws, partly because the 
wolves have nearly all been killed off. Deer 
are so common as to be a menace to crops 
in some places, and there are at least three 
thriving beaver colonies in our part of the 
State. 



IN THE TRESUMPSCOTT WOODS 123 

In 1868 my father, driving on a fishing trip 
through a town sixty-five miles north of us, 
was shown a pair of blanched moose antlers, 
set up over the sign-post at the cross-roads. 

" Look at that well," the stage driver said. 
" That's a sight you'll never see again, not 
in this State!" 

To-day, as every hunter knows, moose are 
plentiful, all through the two-thirds of the 
State that lies under forest; and not only 
there, for this very autumn three have been 
seen in the Tresumpscott woods, while both 
last year and this, a black bear has spent sev- 
eral weeks in our neighborhood. 

Muskrat are found in Tresumpscott Pond 
and its small tributary streams, hares and 
partridges and foxes all through its woods. 
Black duck, and sometimes wood duck, breed 
about the Pond, and Carolina rails; and 
where the brooks that feed the Pond spread 
out into broad estuaries of alder covert, you 
may see the marked flight of snipe or wood- 
cock. 

It was in these woods that Jerome Mitchell, 
our local authority on game and fur (a very 
fair naturalist, also), grew up. He is a slender, 



124 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

well-knit fellow, whose mother had great am- 
bitions for him. He walked into town, five 
miles and back, every day, to get one year in 
the High School, after his country schooling. 
He could not afford any more, but when he 
was seventeen, having picked up a knowledge 
of taxidermy and simple mechanics, he moved 
into town. He worked early and late with 
dogged patience, taking every smallest job 
that offered, till at last he realized his am- 
bition, and opened a small, but good sports- 
men's and general repair shop. Gradually 
he picked up the fur trade of the neighbor- 
hood. He is anxiously fair, and boys from 
the farms soon began to bring in skunk, squir- 
rel, and muskrat skins, and every little while 
a fox or a coon. 

Last year Jerome ran into hard luck. A 
stranger, a good-looking man, brought in an 
extra fine looking lot of muskrat skins. 
There were $600 worth, and this was a low 
figure for them. It was a serious venture, 
still Jerome took them; they turned out, how- 
ever, to be stolen goods, and he had to pay 
the rightful owner, as the stranger was no- 
where to be found. Poor Jerome ! he was 



IN THE TRESUMPSCOTT WOODS 125 

near tears when he told my father about it. 
Then, when he just had his store new painted 
and set in order for the summer's trade, some- 
one dropped a lighted match among the shav- 
ings, and the whole stock and fixtures were 
in a blaze. 

This loss turned out to be not so serious. 
Jerome worked nearly all night for a week, 
and made better fittings than he had had 
before. The wholesale dealers were generous, 
and the shop re-opened with the best outfit 
of goods that it has had at all. 

Now a good windfall has come to him. A 
rural mail-carrier brought word of a silver fox 
which had been trapped on a farm fifteen miles 
out in the country. Jerome only waited to 
telegraph to a big fur dealer for whom he 
works, who has lately established a fox farm, 
and started off at once. He found even better 
than he had hoped. The fox was a perfect 
young male, coal black, and hardly scratched 
by the trap. 

In the recent craze over fox-raising, as much 
as ten thousand dollars has been paid, in our 
State, for a first-rate black fox. Of course 
Jerome would only get a commission, but 



126 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

this was the first big chance that had come 
to him and he was beside himself with 
anxiety lest it miscarry. It was a sharp 
February night, but he slept in the barn 
beside his prize, and the next morning drove 
home, dreading every drift and thank-you- 
ma'am, for fear they might upset, and 
the slight crate that held the fox might 
break. 

That night he slept on the floor of his 
shop, wrapping himself in the sleigh robes. 
The fox ate the meat given him with a good 
appetite, and curled up contentedly enough 
to sleep; but as the first grayness began to 
show before dawn, he stood up, bristling a 
little, and barked, a far-away, lonely sound, 
Jerome said. The next day he was forwarded 
to the dealer in safety. 

My father has shot and hunted all about 
this region, going on snow-shoes after foxes 
and hares in winter, with one of the forest 
farmers — generally one of the Huntingtons — 
as guide or companion; coming into the warm 
dark farm kitchen for a warm-up before the 
long ride or drive home. The Huntingtons 
always had good dogs. Bugle, a fox-hound 



IN THE TRESUMPSCOTT WOODS 127 

famous through the countryside, belonged to 
them. 

John Huntington is the man whom neither 
bee nor wasp will sting. He is sent for all 
about to take away troublesome hornets' 
nests, which he simply tears down and pulls 
to pieces with his bare hands. Some hor- 
nets built a huge nest over the door of the 
stable at the Homestead not long ago, just 
where the men come and go for milking. 
One of the farm men wanted to take a torch 
and smoke it out, but Thomas Burnham, the 
farmer in charge, sent all the way over to 
Tresumpscott for John Huntington. He 
came, a silent, dark, shambling man; looked 
at the nest, nodded, asked for a ladder, 
climbed up, and unconcernedly pulled the 
whole thing down, while the furious hornets 
swarmed over his uncovered face and hands. 
He reached a finger down his neck, first on one 
side, then the other, and took out handfuls of 
them, and scraped them ofT where they had 
crawled up his sleeves. He tore the nest up, 
threw it on the ground, and stamped on it, and 
with few words went back to his farm. 

I have never heard any adequate explana- 



128 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

tion of this phenomenon. Some people say 
that persons having this power have a dis- 
tinctive odor about them, w^hich w^asps and 
bees dislike, and others ascribe it only to an 
entire fearlessness and unconcern. 

Sam Huntington, John's younger brother, is 
a handsome, strong, slender-built fellow, taller 
than John and even darker. It was Sam who 
showed my father, one day out snipe shooting, 
what a bee line really means, and how to take 
one, and find the bee-tree. You catch two 
wild bees, and attach a bit of cotton wool, 
big enough to mark the bee's flight, to each; 
let the first bee go, getting the line of hi^ 
flight well, then walk on two or three hun- 
dred yards, and let the second go, taking note 
equally carefully. Where the two lines inter- 
sect is the bee-tree and the hidden treasure 
of wild honey. 

Sitting in Jacob Damren's clover field one 
day, my father showed me how to find 
bumble-bee honey. We sat still, and watched 
the fat bee go his buzzing way from head 
to head of red clover. At last he had honey 
enough, and off he started on a swifter, 
straighter flight, but he was heavy with 



IN THE TRESUMPSCOTT WOODS 129 

honey, and we could easily follow. He did 
not go far, but swung on a long slant to his 
hole in the ground. We dug where he en- 
tered (he emerged, part way through the 
process, very angry and buzzing) and about 
six inches down we found the honey cells. 
There was a lump or cluster of them, per- 
haps half as big as your hand. They were 
longer than the cells of honey bees; not hex- 
agonal like these, but roughly cylindrical, dark 
brown, and full of very good, clear, dark 
brown honey. 

Tresumpscott Pond is a great haunt of 
whippoorwills. As dusk begins to fringe the 
coverts of the wood, they begin their strange, 
almost ghostly chorus, like the swift whistling 
of a rod through the air, powerful and regu- 
lar, " whip," and '' whip," and " whip " again, 
answering each other all night. I noticed the 
time of their first notes, one night in early 
July. The voices of the veeries fell away, 
and then stopped, at quarter past eight, and 
at quarter of nine the first whippoorwill 
struck up, and was instantly answered. (I 
have known them to begin sharp at eight 
o'clock, or even earlier.) 



130 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

It is extremely hard to see the birds them- 
selves, for they lie hid all day in the deep 
woods, sleeping. Like owls, they seem un- 
able to see well if roused by daylight. At 
night they gather close about the farms, one 
perhaps on the roof of the barn, and one or 
two on a fence (sitting always lengthwise to 
their perch, never across), and sometimes you 
can see their shape silhouetted against the 
sky. Last May, a whippoorwill was bewil- 
dered in a sudden gale, and did not get back 
to the woods, but spent the day sound asleep 
in broad sunlight on the railing of a balcony, 
right in the midst of our town. I stood 
within four feet of him. He is a strange- 
shaped bird, with whiskers like a cat's, and 
a flat head; about the size of a small hawk, 
and mottled, like his cousin the night-hawk, 
with gray and white markings like those of 
rocks and lichens, or of some of the larger 
moths. 



CHAPTER XII 
HARVEST 

In late September an errand took us out to 
Sam Marston's again. We wanted a quantity 
of early farm things, sweet cider, Porter 
apples, and honey. 

The woods were in a flame of fiery color 
as we drove out through the intricacies of 
the river hills. They glowed like beds of 
tulips, with only the dark evergreens to 
set them off, and turned our whole country 
into a huge flower garden. 

The crops had all been very good this 
season. Hay and grain were both heavy, and 
the apple trees had to be propped, the 
branches were so loaded with fruit. Our own 
grapes bore heavily. 

The early apples were just gathering when 
we reached the farm, amongst all sorts of 
pleasant orchard sounds, the rumble of apples 
poured from bushel baskets into barrels, the 
squeak of the cider mill, and the men talking 

131 



132 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

at work. The large new orchard of Belle- 
fleurs is hand-picked, in the modern method; 
each apple is wrapped in paper, and the fruit 
has its special first-rate market; but Sam is 
not going to take his father's old miscel- 
laneous orchard in hand until next year, and 
here he and his men were picking and piling 
in the old wholesale fashion. The sweet- 
smelling pyramids stood waist-high under the 
trees. 

Sam scrambled down his ladder, and 
shouted to Susan, who came out from her 
baking with her hands white with flour. The 
last time we came, we had seen only the 
house and dairy; now we must see the farm, 
and we strolled together through the sunny 
orchard and then were taken to the apple 
cellar, where the filled barrels stood in close 
ranks already. The cellar was fragrant with 
them. Susan's own special apples, Snows, 
Strawberries, and Porters, were at one side. 

"Has to have 'em!" Sam said. "Every 
farm book tells you how mixed apples can't 
pay, and hinder the farm, but come Grange 
suppers and church suppers, and young folks 
happening in, and Fair times, if Susan 



HARVEST 133 

couldn't have her mixed fruit, she'd think we 
might full as well be at the Town-Farm." 

The root cellar, smelling earthy, was next 
the apple cellar, and here Sam had a few 
beets and carrots, in neat bins, but the greater 
part of the roots were still undug. 

The cider-mill was at the edge of the or- 
chard, with piles of wind-fall apples beside 
it; Sam turned a fresh jug-full for us to drink, 
and then filled our cans. 

After this we had to see all Susan's pets. 
There were two handsome collies ; and a yellow 
house cat, and a great black barn cat, on 
stifif terms with each other, came and 
rubbed against us with arched backs. There 
were the ducks and geese, and tumbler 
pigeons, fluttering down in great haste when 
Susan scattered corn. The newest pet was 
a raccoon. He was in the tool-room of thq 
barn, nibbling corn. He steadied the ear as 
he ate, with little hands as careful as a 
child's. He looked sly and mischievous, and 
sidled away as we came in, looking up at us 
with bright eyes. He wore a little collar, and 
dragged a short length of chain, so that the 
pigeons could hear him coming; but he was 



134 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

not confined in any way, and seemed entirely 
happy and at home about the barn. 

" Pretty fellow, then," said Susan, scratch- 
ing his handsome fur. " But he's a scamp, he 
is. Only to think, what happened to my pies, 
last baking! I'd made a quantity, both mince 
and pumpkin, and if this rascal doesn't slip 
into the pantry, eat all he can hold, and mark 
the rest of the pies all over with his little 
hands, and throw them on the floor!" 

She asked if we had ever seen a raccoon 
with a piece of meat. We had not, and she 
fetched a bit from the ice chest and gave it to 
her pet. He took it in his little hands, went 
to his water dish, and washed the meat thor- 
oughly, sousing it up and down till it was al- 
most a pulp, before he swallowed it. Susan 
said that raccoons, wild or tame, will al- 
ways do this, with all animal food; mouse or 
mole or grasshopper, they will not touch it 
till they have washed it well, and will go 
hungry rather than eat unwashed food. Sam, 
who knows the woods like the back of his 
hand, confirmed this. 

" Souse it in a brook, they will, till they 
have it soggy. They won't eat it till then." 



HARVEST 135 

While we were looking, a morose-looking 
old man drove into the yard. He checked his 
horse, and sat gazing straight before him 
with a wooden expression. 

"Hullo, Uncle!" said Sam. "Come for 
apples? " 

The old man shook his head, but said 
nothing. 

"Cider?" said Sam. 

He shook his head also at this, and at every 
other suggestion, and never opened his lips. 
After a while Sam, who seemed to know his 
ways, nodded cheerfully, said, " Well, tell us 
when you get ready to!" and turned towards 
the house. 

The old man waited till he had gone twenty 
feet, and then said grudgingly: 

" I come to see that there cow. You finish 
with your company! I'll wait." 

" That's old Ammi Peaslee," Susan whis- 
pered. " He always acts odd. Oh, no, no 
relation; everyone on the road calls him 
Uncle: 'Uncle Batch' when he's not 
round." 

" He didn't mean to be a batch " (bache- 
lor), she went on reflectively; and then 



136 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

with some shamefacedness, she told us how- 
Mr. Peaselee had once been engaged to be 
married to Miss Charity Jordan (who lived 
alone in the big brick Jordan house at the 
corner) for twenty-five long years. One day 
the lady's roof needed shingling, and she 
called on her suitor to shingle it. (" She 
never could bear to spend money, nor he 
either, and it's a fact that neither one of them 
had much to spend!") 

He did it, and did a good job; but after- 
wards, thinking it but right and fair, he 
brought a set of shirts for his sweetheart to 
make. 

" She made them, and she sent him in a bill; 
and he paid it, and never spoke to her again 
from that day to this, and that is fifteen years 
ago. 

"Now hear me gossip! I am fairly 
ashamed! " Susan cried out. 

The barn was sweet with hay. Part of the 
season's pumpkins were piled in the grain 
room, and lit up the dusk with their dark gold. 
Some of them still lay in golden piles in the 
barn-yard. The ears of corn, yellow and red, 
lay in separate heaps. 



HARVEST 137 

" I miss Mother*! " Susan said (she spoke 
of Sam's mother, who had passed on the 
year before). " She saw to all the pretty 
things about the farm. She used to hang 
the corn in patterns on the ceiling-hooks, 
red and yellow. She'd place the onions in 
amongst the corn, in ropes or bunches, and 
contrive all kinds of pretty notions." 

Susan sighed, and called the two collies to 
her, and patted and fondled their heads. As 
I said before, she and Sam have no children. 

Sam went to get our honey, saying that 
he should be stung to death, and never 
mourned for, for nobody missed a left-handed 
fellar; and Susan took us into the house, and 
brought out doughnuts, a pumpkin pie, and 
cream so thick that it could hardly be 
skimmed. 

When Sam came back with the honey there 
was a to-do, for Susan's Jersey calf, outside 
in the orchard, had tangled itself in its rope, 
and fallen and sprained its shoulder. The 
little creature was trembling all over. Susan 
rubbed in fresh goose-oil, while Sam asked if 
she " didn't want he should get him up a nice 
pair of crutches." 



138 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

For our cranberries, we were to go on a 
mile further, to a farm on the slope of the 
next hill, the Pennys'. 

" The old woman's deaf, but you can make 
her hear by shouting. Most likely she'll be 
the only one of the folks at home. They're 
odd folks," Susan called, shading her eyes to 
look after us, after Sam had succeeded in 
packing our purchases in the wagon, laugh- 
ing and talking about the way Noah filled 
the ark, and Susan had given my little sister 
a wistful kiss. 

The Pennys' was an out-of-the-way place. 
The farm was on the northern slope of a 
hill, the house a tiny unpainted one, weath- 
ered almost to black. The corn was standing 
among the golden pumpkins in stacks that 
looked like huddled witches. A wild grape- 
vine grew over the shed, but the grapes were 
already shriveled. 

Old Mrs. Penny was shriveled too, and 
witch-like, and she was smoking a pipe. It 
was hard to make her understand what we 
wanted, but at last she came out, with a 
checked shawl held over her head, and pointed 
out a path which led through a thicket and 



HARVEST 139 

across the flank of the hills, to the cranberry 
bog in the hollow. 

Mrs. Penny, Jr., was squatted down among 
the swamp mosses, picking cranberries into 
sacks. She was a fat Indian-looking woman, 
and two dark little girls, pretty, and also like 
Indians, with black hair neatly parted, were 
at work with her. They were delighted to 
sell their berries. 

The swamp glowed like a Turkey carpet. 
The cranberry vines and huckleberry bushes 
were pure crimson, the black alder berries 
scarlet, and the ferns burnt-orange. Just 
beyond us, in the velvet of the swamp, was a 
pond, across which the wind ruffled; living 
blue, with tawny rushes around it. 

As we came back, a hunter, in a leather 
jacket, with his gun on his shoulder and 
partridges hanging out of his pockets, stepped 
out of the woods on the path just ahead of 
us. This was old Mrs. Penny's son Jason. 
The open season had not begun yet, but the 
farm looked a hard place for a living, and 
we saw no need of telling, in town, that the 
Penny family had partridge for supper. 

We had a long quiet drive home. It had 



I40 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

been so extraordinarily warm, all through 
early September, that we saw a fine second 
crop of hay being got in, in a low-lying 
meadow bordered by thick woods, part of 
which must have been an old lake-bottom. 
The grass was heavy, and a good many fresh 
haycocks were made and standing already, as 
if in July. The solitary mower rested on his 
scythe to watch us, and then went on, though 
the dusk was fast deepening. 

We stopped when we came to Height of 
Land, to look out over the painted woods. 
They flamed round us to the horizon. 

Later the moon rose, in the half-blue, half- 
dusk, and presently shone on a white mist- 
lake, over the low land through which we 
were then passing. The mist was rising, and 
wreathing the colored woods with white. 
Next came two more hills, and then another 
mist-lake in the moonlight. 



CHAPTER XIII 
WATSON'S HILL 

By October of this year the fires of Sep- 
tember had sunk to a rich smouldering glow. 
The rolling woods, as far as the eye could 
see, were masses of dusky gold and wine- 
color. There was actual smoke, too, pale 
blue in the hollows, from many forest fires. 

Nearly all of October was Indian Summer. 
Every day there was a soft golden haze, just 
veiling the yellow of the woods, and the days 
were warm and still, like midsummer, but 
with a kind of mellow peacefulness. 

We spent a whole day out on Watson's 
Hill, watching the distant smoke of forest 
fires, and listening to the different Autumn 
sounds, the ring of axes from the wooded 
part of the hill, an occasional shot, the tap- 
ping of woodpeckers, and the friendly chir- 
ruping of chickadees and juncos. The bare 
hill-top was steeped in sunshine. The checker- 
berries and beechnuts were just ripe, and 

141 



142 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

very good. We built our fire on a flat- 
topped, lichened rock, and found water to 
drink in a little tarn among the russet and 
tawny ferns and cotton-grasses, fed by a 
spring which stirred and dimpled the surface. 

Driving home, at dusk, we passed field after 
field of Indian Warriors, corn-stacks, all look- 
ing the same way, with golden pumpkins 
among them; and suddenly, over the eastern 
ridge, the great round yellow Hunter's Moon 
rose. 

It was strange, later, to see the oaks and 
sugar maples, towers of gold, instead of 
towers of green, in the moonlight. 

A few days later we had a three days' 
storm of rain and heavy wind, and then the 
golden harvest lay on the ground. It was 
heaped and piled along the roadsides in win- 
rows, through which the children scuffed and 
frolicked. 

(The leaves in the town streets are burned, 
which is a waste, but if we were so thrifty 
as to keep them we should lose the autumn 
bonfires. I counted fourteen about the dif- 
ferent streets, one evening, each with a glow 
lighting up the dusk, and giving out an in- 



WATSON'S HILL 143 

describable sweet-and-acrid smell as the 
smoke poured out in cream-white swirls, al- 
most thick enough to be felt. The men in 
charge of them looked black against the 
blaze, and a flock of children were scamper- 
ing about each fire.) The day after the rain 
the leaves lay all through the woods like a 
yellow carpet, and threw up actual light. In 
some places they had fallen in lines and pat- 
terns, and, wet with rain and autumn dew, 
they gave out fragrance which was as sweet 
as wine. 

Late in October there was sudden illness 
at a friend's house. Every nurse in town was 
busy already, and we drove out to see if we 
could get Marcia Watson, at Watson's Hill. 
Marcia is not a graduate nurse, but she knows 
what a sick woman wants, and what a sick 
household, paralyzed by the illness of its 
head, must have, and can set the whole 
stricken machinery in order again. She is a 
tiny creature, as merry as a squirrel, with 
quick, tranquil ways. 

The Watson's Hill district is six miles east 
of us. The Hill is a beech-wooded ridge, 
rocky through its whole length, and curv- 



144 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

ing almost enough to suggest an amphi- 
theatre. A good farming region lies 
spread out below it, and there is a village 
nucleus, a store, the Grange Hall, and a 
meeting-house. The hall was burnt, two 
years ago, and the whole neighborhood set 
to work to rebuild it. They had fifteen-cent 
entertainments and peanut parties, and sales 
of aprons and cooked food. The men did the 
building, giving their time, and the women 
cooked for the men, and this fall the last 
shingle of the substantial new building was 
laid. 

The only mill for many miles is the corn- 
cannery. Corn-husking always brings farm 
neighbors together; sweet corn, for can- 
ning, is husked in August, fodder corn 
in late October. Families come to husk 
for each other, and the wide barn floors 
where they sit are piled high with 
husks; but in the districts near a cannery, 
as here, the whole community gathers. 
In good weather the work is all done out of 
doors, and the laughing and chatting groups, 
men, women, and children, sit up to their 
waists in husks. The stoves and kitchens of 



WATSON'S HILL 145 

neighbors are all pre-empted, and the women 
bake and fry, and come bustling out to the 
workers with milk, bread and cheese, pies and 
doughnuts. 

Here, at Watson's Hill, as at nearly every 
farm village in our part of the world, the 
neighbors meet for the weekly dance, which 
is as much a matter of course as church on 
Sundays. It would be hard to describe ade- 
quately the friendliness and complete sociable- 
ness of these neighborhood gatherings. Old 
and middle-aged and young are called by 
their first names, and everybody dances; not 
round dances, but the beautiful old country 
dances, which, transplanted over seas and 
carried down a century, still show their qual- 
ity, and keep something of the courtly nature 
of the great houses in France and England 
where they had their stately beginnings: a 
quality that gives a certain true social train- 
ing. Everyone in the hall is truly in com- 
pany. Hands must be given and glances met, 
all round the dance, and awkwardness and 
shyness are quickly danced out of existence. 

We have the Lancers, the Tempest, the 
Lady of the Lake, and various quadrilles. 



146 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

They cannot now perhaps be called exactly- 
stately. 

"Balance to partners!" calls out old Abel 
Tarbox, master of ceremonies of the Grange 
Hall, as he fiddles. 

''Balance to partner! Swing the same! 
All sashy!" And then comes the splendid 
romp of, 

"Eight hands round!" and "Eight hands 
down the middle!" 

Besides the old court dances, there are 
Pop Goes the Weasel, Money Musk, Hull's 
Victory, and others, pretty, intricate frolics, 
which in their day were the dernier cri of 
fashion, danced by gilded youth in great 
cities, velvet coat and ruffles, flowered silk 
petticoat, and spangled fan. 

The Chorus Jig is very difficult. It has 
" contra-corners," and other mysteries im- 
possible to uninitiated feet. 

When money is to be raised for some 
neighborhood purpose partners for the even- 
ing are chosen in what I should think might 
be a trying, though a most practical fashion. 
On one Saturday evening the ladies, on the 
next the gentlemen, are put up for auction 



WATSON'S HILL 147 

as partners, the price paid being in peanuts. 
A popular partner will sometimes bring as 
much as a hundred and twenty-five peanuts; 
and why little Alfred Stoddard, who never 
did anything in his life but get a musical 
degree at some tiny college (there are even 
those who say that he bought the degree), who 
reads catalogues and nurses his dignity while 
his wife works the farm, should regularly fetch 
this fancy price, I never could see. 

"Oh, well!" says Sam Marston, "Alfred 
has them handsome, mournful dark eyes. 
The ladies can't resist 'em." 

The three Watson farms lie to the east of 
the hill, right under its rocky ledges, and are 
sheltered by it; indeed the whole of the beau- 
tiful rounded valley which they occupy is 
rimmed entirely by low abrupt hills. It must 
be an old lake bottom, for the last remnant 
of the lake, a pond a hundred yards or so 
long, still sparkles bright blue in the midst 
of it. 

Forty years ago Tristam Watson, with 
his wife and four children, three boys, and 
Marcia, the youngest, went north two hundred 
miles, to the Aroostook, when that re- 



148 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

gion still lay under heavy forest. He built 
his cabin among the first-growth pines, and 
cleared and planted among the trees, burning 
and uprooting the stumps gradually, as he 
could. It was pioneer life, with no roads and 
almost no neighbors. Bear and moose were 
common, and deer more than common, and 
there were wolves in a hard winter; but he 
was a hardy, vigorous man with hardy chil- 
dren, and he did well. 

He had no idea of cutting himself and his 
family off from their home ties. Nothing of 
the sort. The railroad ran only a short part 
of the way, and they could not afford that 
part, but every year they hitched up and 
drove home, the whole distance. It took them 
about five days. They had a little home-made 
tent, and they built their fire and set up their 
gipsy housekeeping each night beside the 
road. If it rained, '' why then it rained," 
Marcia says. The year was marked by this 
flight; it was their great adventure, and 
apparently a perfect frolic, at least for the 
children. They stayed two or three weeks, 
saw all the " folks," and went back to their 
strenuous forest life. 



WATSON'S HILL 149 

Tristram died at about sixty, and the family 
came home, and took up the three beautiful 
farms left to the sons by their grandparents. 
The two elder sons married, the third stayed 
with his mother and sister. 

Not long after they came back, Marcia fell 
ill. There was a badly aggravated strain, and 
she had measles and bronchitis, and after that, 
as we say in the country, she " commenced 
ailing." She changed in a year from a bloom- 
ing girl to the little thin, white-faced woman 
she is now (though her black eyes never 
stopped twinkling). 

A long illness on an isolated farm is a bad 
thing for more than bodily health. The 
Rural Free Delivery and Rural Telephone, 
and the lengthening trolley lines, are bringing 
the most wholesome stir imaginable after the 
old colorless days; but in old times the out- 
lying farms too often held pitiful brooding 
figures of women, sunk in depression. Mar- 
cia's terror was lest she should fall under this 
shadow. She had seen only too many such 
cases, and the fear was beginning to realize it- 
self, she often has told me; but from its very 
danger her mind, fundamentally sane and 



150 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

vigorous, plucked out its salvation. First 
absorbed in her own ailments, she began to 
question her doctor about the cure of other 
diseases. Soon she asked him for books on 
medicine. She read and studied, and then one 
day she asked him to take her to see a suffer- 
ing neighbor. To humor her, he did, and 
almost at once, ill as she still was, she began 
to help nursing patients on the neighboring 
farms. Once her mind took hold of work, it 
cleared itself as the sky clears of clouds 
when the wind blows. It was like a slender 
but vigorous-fibred little tree reaching out 
and finding life-giving soil for itself. I do 
not believe she has an ounce of extra strength, 
even now, and she is by no means always free 
from pain, but she can do her work, and for 
five years she has been the most sought-after 
nurse in half the county. 

She has an imp's fun (and had, even when 
she was most ill) and can make a groaning 
patient laugh, as she lays on hot compresses. 
As we drove home that day in October, she 
told me how she had been outwitting her 
brother. (He is a handsome blond-bearded 
fellow, with what is rare on the farms, a 



WATSON'S HILL 151 

carriage as erect as a soldier's. He is far 
slower-natured than Marcia.) 

" He's been real tardy, this year, in getting 
the hams smoked, and he put off building a 
smoke-house. He was all for hauling his lum- 
ber. Nothing would do but that lumber must 
be hauled first, whether the pigs were smoked, 
or whether they flew; and there were Mother 
and I in want of our bacon." 

He started out with the lumber. The mo- 
ment his back was turned Marcia pounced on 
his brand-new chicken coop (" he fusses like 
a woman buying a bonnet, over his chicken 
coops "), which was just finished and right, 
and smoked the meat for herself. 

" That man was fairly annoyed ! " she told 
me demurely. 

Last spring the brother and sister shingled 
the barn roof together. Leonard, the brother, 
was deliberate and painstaking, and Marcia in 
triumph nailed his coat-tails to the roof, ac- 
cording to the time-honored privilege of the 
shingle-nailer, if the shingle-layer lets him- 
self get caught up with. 

It was from Marcia and her brother that 
1 first heard the expression " var," for balsam 



152 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

fir. This is our general country term; but 
I do not know whether this is a survival of 
some older form, or a corruption. Here in the 
Watson Hill neighborhood I have also heard 
the old-fashioned word "suent," meaning con- 
venient, suitable, so familiar in dialect stories 
of Somersetshire and Devon. 

It was well past the fall of the year before 
we drove Marcia home again, and a wild 
autumn storm of wind and heavy rain had 
carried away all but the last of the hanging 
leaves. The shores of the ponds and rivers 
showed clear ashes-and-slate colors, and clear 
dark grays, but the fields were the pale russet 
which lasts all winter under the snow. Beech 
leaves were still hanging, a beautiful tender 
fawn color, and, of course, oak leaves, and the 
gray birches were like puffs of pale yellow- 
smoke in among the purple and ashen woods. 
Crab-apples still hung, withered red, on the 
trees, and the hips of the wild roses and haws 
of the hawthorns, and the black alder berries, 
made little blurs of scarlet in the swamps. 
Here and there the road dipped through small 
copses, bare of leaves, where there were 
masses of clematis, carrying its tufts of soft 



WATSON'S HILL 153 

gray fluff, entwined among the bushes, and 
milkweed pods, just letting out their shining 
silver-white silk. Witch-hazel was in flower 
all through the woods. 

The evergreens showed up everywhere, in 
delicate vigorous beauty, and we counted un- 
guessed masses of pine among the hills. I 
think we always expect a little sadness with 
the fall of the leaves, but instead there is a 
sense of elation, with the greater spread of 
light and the wider views opening every- 
where. The wood roads showed more plainly 
than in summer, and paths stood out green 
across the fields. The tender unveiling of 
autumn had revealed the hidden topography 
of the forest, and countless small ravines and 
slopes were suddenly made plain. There were 
smaller, friendly revelations, too, for we came 
here and there, on large and small nests, and 
saw where the vireos and warblers had had 
their tiny housekeeping. 

Late ploughing was over, and hauling had 
begun. We passed a good many loads of 
potatoes and apples, on their way to the rail- 
road, and then a load of wood, and one of 
balsam fir boughs, for banking the houses. 



154 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

The wood was drawn by a pair of hand- 
some black and cream-white oxen, and the 
boughs by a pair of " old natives," plain red 
brown. The potatoes and fruit must all be 
hauled before the cold is too great. 

For the last three miles before the land 
opens out into the Watson farms, the hills 
are covered with low woods, above which rises 
the pointed head of Rattlesnake Hill, the 
only high land in sight. The woods were 
like purplish fur over the hillsides, and nearer 
showed countless perfect rounded gray rods 
and wands, like fine strokes of a brush. There 
was a great shining of wet rocks and mossy 
places. It was one of those still late-autumn 
mornings, perfectly clear after the rain, when 
the air is as fragrant and full of life as in 
spring. 

Longfellow Pond lies in a hollow of the 
woods, three miles from anywhere, a beau- 
tiful little wild wooded place, three-quarters 
of a mile long, where wild duck come. Alas! 
when we came near, a portable saw-mill was 
at work close to the shore! A high pile of 
warm-colored sawdust rose already in the 
beautiful green of the pine wood. They had 



WATSON'S HILL 155 

just felled three big pines, and the new-cut 
butts showed white among the masses of 
lopped branches. 

The stretch of wooded country about the 
pond lies in a belt or fold between two pros- 
perous farming districts, and has its own 
population, a gipsy-looking set, living in the 
woods in little shacks, half-farmhouse, half- 
shanty, with a few straggling chickens. The 
men of this place were working for the 
operator of the saw-mill. It was dinner-time 
when we came by, and half a dozen lithe dark 
young men were sitting about on the log ends, 
eating their dinner, which some little dusky 
children had brought them in pails and odd 
dishes. 

We walked down between the stacks of 
fragrant new-cut lumber to the edge of the 
pond, which lay between its wooded shores, 
as blue as the sky, sparkling in the sunshine. 
We could make out three duck at the farther 
end of it. It is a pity to have the fine growth 
of pine cut, but it grows fast again with us. 
Nobody cares for the lesser hard wood 
growths in such an over-forested State as 
ours, and once the saw-mill is gone, the pond 



156 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE . 

will probably stay its wild lonely self, per- 
haps for ages. 

The last day that Marcia was with us she 
wanted to see the river, and we went down 
and found the flood tide making strongly, 
two or three gulls sailing peacefully about, 
and a late coal barge being towed down 
against the tide. We had three days of still 
deep frost after this, and the next day when 
I went down to a hill overlooking one of the 
most beautiful reaches of the river, there it 
lay, a transparent gray mirror, not to move 
again until April, All the colors of the banks 
were pearl and ashen. Though it lay so still, 
it whispered and talked to itself incessantly. 
There were little ringing gurgles, like the 
sound of a glass water-hammer; now tinklings, 
now the fall of a tiny crystal avalanche; with 
occasional deeper soft boomings and resound- 
ings, and all the time a whispered swish-swish 
along the banks, the sound of the soft break- 
ing and fall of the shell ice as the tide ebbed. 



CHAPTER XIV 
EARLY WINTER. 

Like the inside of a pearl; like the inside 
of a star-sapphire; like a rainbow at twilight. 
We are in a white world, and save for the rich 
warmth of the pines and hemlocks there is 
no color stronger than the delicate penciling 
of the woods; but the whiteness is softened 
all day by a frost-haze which the sunlight 
turns into silver. The horizon is veiled with 
smoke-color and tender opal. It is as if the 
world retired for a little to a space of softened 
sunrise colors, never hard or sharp; lovely and 
unearthly as the clouds. We are so well to 
the north that in winter we enter the sub- 
arctic borderland, the shadowy-twilight re- 
gions of the two ends of the earth. 

It is a very still time of year, there is a 
wonderful uplifting quiet. The sun burns low 
in the south, a mass of soft white fire, not 
blinding as in summer; its light plainly that 

of a great low-hanging star. 

157 



158 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

This is the dark season; but to make up 
for the shortness of the days we are given 
such glories of sunrise and sunset, and such 
a glittering brilliancy of stars, as come at no 
other time. All summer these belong to 
farmers, shepherds, and sailors; but now even 
slug-abeds can be out before first light, and 
watch the great stars fade, and dawn grow, 
and then come back to that cozy and exciting 
feast, breakfast by candle and fire light. 

You step out into the frosty dark, with 
Venus pulsing and burning like a great lamp, 
and the snow luminous around you. The 
stars are like diamonds, and the sky black, 
and lo! there is the Dipper, straight overhead. 
It is night, yet not night, because of the 
whiteness of the snow, and because the air is 
already alive with the coming morning. The 
snow crunches sharply underfoot. The dry 
air tickles and tingles and makes you cough. 
The street lamps are still bright, and here and 
there the lighted windows of other early 
risers show a cheerful yellow in the snow. 
It is a friendly time of day. Neighbors call 
good-morning to each other in the dark, and 
sleigh-bells jingle past. Then you come home 



EARLY WINTER 159 

to the firelight and the gay-lighted breakfast 
table, with dawn stealing up fast, like lamp- 
light spreading from the bright crack under a 
door. 

As the first shafts of sunlight strike across, 
they light up a million frost-crystals. The 
air is alive with them, on all sides, delicate 
star and wheel shapes, flashing like diamonds. 
This beautiful phenomenon lasts only about 
half an hour. The fairy crystals, light as the 
air, floating about you, vanish, but the snow 
continues to flash softly, from countless tiny 
stars and facets, all day. 

Frost mists hover all day about our valley, 
the breath of the sleeping river. They are 
drawn through our streets all day in veils and 
wisps of softness. Smoke and steam clouds hold 
their shape long in the winter temperatures. 
At night the smoke from the chimneys curls 
up in pale blue columns in the rarefied air, 
against the dark but clear blue of the winter 
night sky. By day the steam pufifs from the 
locomotives rise pinky-bufif, or almost gold- 
color, and keep their shape for a few mo- 
ments as firm as thunderheads. 

This year, mid-winter for the sun is the 



i6o A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

moon's midsummer. The full moon rises and 
sets so far to the north that she completes full 
three-quarters of the circle. At night she rides 
at the zenith, high and small, and the snow 
fields seem illimitable and remote under her 
lonely light. The expanse of snow so increases 
both sun and moon light that she seems to rise 
while it is still broad day; and still to be shin- 
ing with full silver, in her unwonted northern 
station, after broad day again, at dawn. 

We share some of the phenomena of 
light of the polar regions. Moon rainbows 
are sometimes seen at night; and as this is 
the season of most frequent mock suns — 
par-helia — so also mock moons — par-selenes — 
half-nebulous, massed effects of softly bright 
radiance, appear on the hovering frost mists; 
and sharply outlined lunar halos herald snow- 
storms. 

Indeed the greatly increased extent of snow- 
expanse magnifies all effects of light extraor- 
dinarily. 

At sunset, softened colors, " peach-blossom 
and dove-color," like the bands of a wide and 
diffused rainbow, appear in the east; this is 
the sunset light, caught by the snowfields, and 



EARLY WINTER i6i 

reflected on the eastern clouds and mists. Not 
only this; the "old moon in the new moon's 
arms," instead of being a blank mass, as in 
summer, is darkly luminous, so greatly has the 
earth-shine on the moon been magnified. 

A winter night is never really dark. Thanks 
to the rarefied air, the stars burn and blaze as 
at no other season; Sirius appearing to sparkle 
with an even bluer light than in summer. You 
can tell time by a small watch, easily, by star- 
light, with no other aid but the diffused glim- 
mer of the snow fields. 

The other morning an errand took my 
brother and me out early over the long hill 
that makes the Height of Land to the west. 
There must have been an amazing fall of 
frost-dew the night before, for we saw a 
sight which I shall never forget; not only 
the twigs and the branches, but the actual 
trunks of the trees, the stone-walls, and the 
roadside shrubberies and seed-vessels, frosted 
with crystals like fern-fronds, two inches or 
more long. There is a wood of pines at 
the crest of the hill, and here not a green 
needle showed, not one bit of bark; the trees 
rose pure white against the pure blue 



1 62 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

sky, over the white skyline of the hill. Look- 
ing out over the country, all the v^oods were 
silver; silver-white where the light took them, 
silver-gray in shadow. Light flashed round 
us everywhere, so that it was almost dazzling, 
yet it was softened light; stars, not diamonds. 

Once the snow comes, the neighborhood 
settles to a certain happy quiet. It is as if 
winter laid a strong arm about us, encircling 
and soothing. The dry air sparkles like 
wine. Dusk falls early; the wood fires on the 
hearths burn bright, and the evenings beside 
them are never too long. It is a neighborly 
time, and the long peaceful hours of work 
bring a sense of achievement. 

Out on the farms, the year's supply of 
wood is being cut. This, with hauling the 
hay, and ice-cutting, makes the chief winter 
work; and the men who are out chopping all 
day in the woods become hardy indeed. 

Ice-cutting on the river begins in January. 
The wide hollow of the river valley is so 
white that the men and horses moving up 
and down stand out in warm color; the 
strange snow silence makes an almost palpa- 
ble background to the cheerful and sharp 



EARLY WINTER 163 

sounds of work, the ring of metal, the squeak 
of leather, the men's shouts and talk, and the 
steady roar which goes up from the ice ploughs 
and cutters. There are small portable forges 
here and there for mending tools, at the fires 
of which the men heat their coffee. The ice- 
cakes are clear blue, and they are lifted out 
and started up the run in leisurely procession. 
Directly the first cutting is made you have the 
startling sight of a field of bright blue living 
water in the midst of the whiteness; while 
along the shore, the rising tide often overflows 
the shore ice, in pools and rivulets, the color 
of yellow-green jade. 

The work is done with heavy steel tools. 
First the ice must be marked, then planed to a 
smooth surface, then grooved more deeply, 
and for the last few inches sawed by hand 
with long ice-saws. It is pleasant work on 
sunny days, and the men, who have mostly 
come in from the farms, like its sociableness; 
but often the wind sweeps down the valley 
bitterly cold, and then it is very severe, espe- 
cially the work of keeping the canals open at 
night. The ice generally runs to about two 
feet thick. 



i64 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

The ice-business in our valley has fallen 
off since the formation of the Ice Trust and 
the increased use of artificial ice. A great 
part of our ice fields are only held in reserve 
now, in case the more southern ice fails, but it 
still makes a winter harvest for us. The 
river towns must always have their own ice, 
and the farmers who cut it get good pay for 
their work and that of their horses. They 
speak of the work entirely in farm terms. 
They " cultivate " the ice, and " harvest " the 
" crop." 

Last week we made an expedition across 
country to where the beautiful little chain 
of the Assimasqua ponds and streams lies 
between the ranges of Maple Hill on the west, 
and Wrenn's Mountain on the east; and there, 
on Upper Assimasqua, was the same phe- 
nomenon of frost-crystals which we saw on 
Dunnack Hill, only here it was on the ice. 
We thought at first the pond was covered with 
snow, but as we walked out on it, we saw 
it was frost, in such ice-flowers as I have 
never seen before. They were like clusters of 
crystal fern-fronds, each frond an inch and a 
half to two inches long. At first these flowers 



EARLY WINTER 165 

were scattered in clusters about six inches 
apart over the black ice, but farther on they 
ran together into a solid field of silver, a 
miniature forest of flashing fern or palm 
fronds, so delicate and light it seemed as if 
they must bend v^ith the breeze. They out- 
lined each crack in the ice with close garlands. 
We could hardly bear to crush them as we 
walked through them. 

The four Assimasqua Ponds lie low between 
hills that are heavily wooded, mostly with 
beech and hemlock. The shores are high and 
irregular and jut out in narrow points, and 
these and the islands have small cliffs, of 
gnarled and twisted strata, which the hem- 
locks overhang, in masses of feathery green. 

There was something appealing and endear- 
ing in the beauty of this little forest chain 
of lakes and streams, lying still and white 
between its wooded shores. We crossed its 
wide surface on foot, and followed up the 
course of the stream which whirled and tum- 
bled so, only a month ago. Every tiny reach 
and channel was ours to explore. It was as 
quiet as a child lying asleep. 

We built a fire on the south shore of a 



i66 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

headland, where a curve of the gnarled cliffs 
enclosed a tiny beach, cooked bacon, and 
heated coffee. Twenty yards from the shore 
there was a round hole, some eight inches 
across, of black dimpling water. It had 
not been cut, but was natural, being, I 
suppose, over a warm spring. The ice 
was so strong around it that we could drink 
from it. 

It was so warm in the sun that we sat 
about bareheaded and barehanded, yet not a 
frost-needle melted. The sunlight glinted on 
the hemlock needles, all the way up the hill- 
sides, and a balsamy sweetness seemed to be 
all about us, mixed with the pungent smoke 
of our wood fire. 

The chickadees were busy all round us, 
making little bright chirrupy sounds. We 
could hear blue-jays calling, deeper in the 
woods, and the occasional " crake, crake, 
crake," of a blue nuthatch. The dry winter 
woods cracked and the pond rang and gur- 
gled with pretty hollow noises. The hem- 
locks had fruited heavily, and were hung all 
over with little bright brown cones, like 
Christmas trees. They seem to give out 



EARLY WINTER 167 

fragrant sunny health all winter, a dry thrifty 
vigor. 

We did not see a soul on all the Upper 
Ponds, and only fox tracks ran in and out of 
the marsh-grasses of the stream, but on 
Lower Assimasqua there were men cutting 
wood. They were cutting out beech and 
white and yellow birch for firewood, and 
leaving the hemlock, which grew very thick 
here. The cut wood stood about the slope in 
neatly piled bright-colored stacks, with col- 
ored chips among the fallen branches, and the 
axe blows rang sharp and musical in the winter 
silence. The men, who were good-looking 
fellows, wore woolen or corduroy, with high 
moccasins, and their sheepskin and mackinaw 
coats were thrown aside on the snow. There 
were five or six of them, mostly young men, 
and one handsome older man, with hawk 
features and a bright color, silver hair and 
beard, and bright warm brown eyes. They 
had bread, doughnuts, and pie for their din- 
ner, and a jug of cider. 

The Lower is the largest of the four ponds. 
It is, perhaps, three miles long by a mile wide, 
but it seemed almost limitless, under the 



1 68 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

snow, and we felt like pygmy creatures, walk- 
ing in the midst, with the unbroken level 
stretching away around us. 

The sky was deepening into indescribable 
colors, peacock blue, peacock gray, and in 
the middle of the expanse, over the woods, 
we saw the great full moon, just rising clear 
out of the violet and opal tenebrae, the 
fringes of the sky. She was as pale as a 
bubble, or as the palest pink summer cloud, 
but gathered color fast, then poured her floods 
of silver. The whiteness of the pond glim- 
mered more and more strangely as dusk in- 
creased. 

We came home, stiff and happy, to a great 
wood fire, piled in a wide and deep fireplace, 
and to a room of firelight and evergreen- 
scented shadows. 

That night a light rain fell, then turned 
to a busy snow-storm, which fell for hours 
on the wet surfaces in thick soft-falling 
flakes, so that by the next morning the 
world was a fairy forest of white. The 
trees bent down under their feathery load. 
Wonderful low intricately crossed branches 
were everywhere. Each littlest grove and 



EARLY WINTER 169 

clump of shrubbery became a dense thicket 
of white. This fairy forest was close, close 
round us, so that each street seemed magi- 
cal and unfamiliar, a place that we had never 
seen before. It was a perfectly hushed world. 
Our footsteps made no sound, and even the 
masses from the overladen branches came 
down silently. Everything but whiteness was 
obliterated; then at night the moon came 
out clear again, and lighted up this fairy 
world, and the white spirits of trees stood up 
against the gray-black sky. 

Ten days after this there followed a great 
ice-storm, when for two days rain fell in- 
cessantly, and, as it fell, covered the twigs 
and branches with crystal. It cleared on the 
third morning, and instead of white, we were 
in a world of diamond. The dazzling bril- 
liancy was almost more than the eye could 
bear. Every blade of grass and seed-vessel 
was changed to a crystal jewel, and the 
breeze set them tinkling. The sky was fairy 
blue. The woods and all the fields flashed 
round us as we walked almost spell-bound 
through their strange beauty. The wonder 
was that the whole star-like world did not 



lyo A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

clash and ring as if with silver harp music. 
As the sun rose higher, the country was 
veiled with frost haze, but through it, and 
beyond, we saw the shining of the crust on 
all the distant hills. 



CHAPTER XV 
ASSIMASQUA, AND MARSTON 

Assimasqua Mountain rises abruptly to the 
west of the four ponds, a noble hill or range, 
five miles in length. 

The west shore of the Assimasqua lakes 
sweeps abruptly up to the high crest of the 
ridge, which is very irregular. It is partly 
wooded, partly half-grown-up pasture, partly 
ledge, and along the high grassy summit 
small chasms open and lead away into deep 
woods of hemlock. The steep east side is 
covered for most of its length with an amaz- 
ing growth of juniper, hundreds and hun- 
dreds of close-massed bushes of great size and 
thickness. The ridge holds a number of little 
dark mountain tarns, and half a dozen good 
brooks tumble down its sides in small cas- 
cades. The folds of its forest skirts broaden 
out to the west into the bottom lands at its 
feet. To the east, the valleys of the brooks 

171 



172 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

deepen and sharpen into ravines through the 
woods, as they draw near the lakes. 

The shores all about the four lakes, as 
I said, are heavily wooded, and there are but 
one or two farms, and these only small clear- 
ings. A singular person lived in one of them, 
who worked for years over a great invention, 
a boat which was to utilize the wind by 
means of a windmill, which in turn worked a 
small paddle-wheel. No one now knows 
whether he had never heard of such a thing 
as a sail, or merely thought sails dangerous. 
He was absorbed in his project; and he did 
get his boat to go, in time, and at least a 
few times she trundled a clumsy course 
around the lake. 

Near the south end of the Mountain is 
the old Hale place. Mr. Hale was a gentle- 
looking man, very neat, with a quiet voice 
and ways. He kept his wide fields finely 
cultivated, and had a large orchard, and 
twelve Jersey cows. The lane through which 
they filed home at night is enclosed between 
the two mightiest stump fences I have ever 
seen, fully ten feet high, and a perfect wilder- 
ness to climb over. They look like the bran- 



ASSIMASQUA, AND MARSTON 173 

dished arms of witches, or like enormous 
antlers, against the sky, and are thickly 
fringed all along their base with delicate 
Dicksonia fern. Stump fences are fast becom- 
ing rare with us, and these must be the over- 
turned stumps of first-growth pine. 

After Mr. and Mrs. Hale died, the farm 
passed to a sister, Mrs. Wrenn, and when her 
husband, too, died — he had been a slack 
man, with no hold on anything — she made 
the fatal mistake, too common among old 
people on the farms, of making over the 
property to a kinsman (in this case, a married 
step-niece and her husband) on condition of 
support. I never knew Mrs. Wrenn, but a 
young farmer's wife, a friend of mine, was 
anxious about her troubles, and through her 
there came to our notice an incident which 
seemed to light up the whole gray region 
of the farm. 

The neighbors began to hear rumors of 
neglect and abuse. Mrs. Wrenn was never 
seen, and those who knew the skinflint ways 
of her entertainers suspected trouble and 
presently confided their fears to the young 
doctor of the neighborhood. He came at 



174 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

once, and found the poor soul in a fatal ill- 
ness, left alone in unspeakable dirt and 
squalor in a sort of out-house, with unwashed 
bed-clothes, no one to feed or tend her, and 
food which she could not touch put roughly 
beside her once a day. There were signs too 
of actual rough handling. 

" Don't try to make me live! " the old lady 
whispered, with command and entreaty. 
*' Don't ye dare to keep me living," and he 
assured her solemnly that he would not, ex- 
cept in reason, and would only make her 
more comfortable. He rated the bad woman 
in charge till he had her well frightened, and 
then, though it was not only dark already, 
but raining fast (and though he was 
poor himself, with his way to make and no 
financial backing) he drove five miles to town 
and brought back and installed a nurse at his 
own expense. 

" The tears were running down his cheeks," 
the nurse herself told me, " when he assured 
that poor old creature that either he or I 
would be with her day and night, that we 
would never leave her, and she would be 
safe with us. He paid my charges, and all 



ASSIMASQUA, AND MARSTON 175 

supplies and food, out of his own pocket. 
He saw her every day, and when her release 
came, he was close beside her, and had her 
hand in his. He couldn't have been more 
tender to his own mother. And he gave 
that bad woman a part of what she de- 
served." 

I should like to say something more of this 
young physician. He started as a farm boy, 
with no capital beyond insight and purpose, 
and skilled hands, and was led to his career, 
or rather could not keep himself from his 
career, because of the fire of pity and tender- 
ness that possessed him. He has come to 
honor and recognition now, but at the time 
of which I write, and for years, he was known 
only to a thirty-mile circle of farm people, 
a good part of them too poor to pay for any 
services. He gave himself to them, without 
knowing that he was giving anything. He 
was a born citizen, too, served as overseer of 
the poor, and as selectman, and people con- 
sulted him about their quarrels and troubles. 

I spoke of the incident about Mrs. Wrenn, 
which the nurse had told me a year or more 
after it happened, to the doctor's wife, some 



176 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

weeks since. He had never told her of it. Her 
eyes filled with tears. 

" That is just like him," she said. 

The Ridge slopes down to the west, to the 
rich plains through which the Marston com- 
munities are scattered — Marston Centre, 
North and West Marston, Marston Plains. 
The " Four Marstons " are a notable district, 
for Marston Academy had the luck to be 
founded, nearly a hundred years ago, by per- 
sons of liberal education, and the dwellers in 
the comfortable four-square brick houses of 
the neighborhood have more than kept up its 
intellectual traditions; though the town has 
no railroad communication, and only one mill, 
the shovel factory, since the old saw-mill 
which cut the first-growth pines on the slopes 
of Assimasqua has been given up. 

The Marston saw-mill is chiefly remem- 
bered because of Hiram Andros, who worked 
there as sawyer for forty-five years, and had 
the name of the best judge of timber in the 
State. The sawye/s is a notable position. He 
himself does no actual work, but stands near 
the saw, and in the brief moment when each 
log is run on to the carriage, holds up the 



ASSIMASQUA, AND MARSTON 177 

requisite number of fingers to show whether 
it is to be a three, a four, or five-inch timber, 
or cut into boards or planks; which cut will 
make the best use of the log, with the least 
waste. The sawyer gets high pay, six to ten 
dollars a day, and earns it, for on his single 
judgment, delivered in that fraction of a 
minute, the mill's prosperity hangs. 

What is it that gives a town so distinct a 
color and fibre? Marston people have kept, 
generation after generation, a fine flavor and 
distinction. They are in touch with the 
world, in the best sense, and men of science 
and leaders of thought in university life, as 
well as business magnates, have gone out 
from Marston, yet still feel they belong there. 

Eliphalet Marston, who built and owned 
the shovel factory, made it his study to pro- 
duce the best shovel that could be made, the 
best wearing, the soundest. In later life his 
son tried to induce him to go about through 
the country, and look up his customers, to 
increase trade. The son was very emphatic; 
it was what everyone did, the only way to 
keep up-to-date and advertise the business, 
and Eliphalet must not become moss-grown. 



178 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

He shook his head, but after much hammer- 
ing started off, though not really persuaded. 
He went to a big wholesale dealer in Chicago, 
but did not mention his name, merely said he 
was there to talk shovels. 

" Don't mention shovels to me," said the 
dealer. '' There's just one shovel that's worth 
having, just one that's honest, and that's the 
one that I'm handling. There it is," he said, 
producing it. "Look at it; that's the only 
shovel that's made in this country; made by 
a man named Marston, at Marston Plains, 
State of " 

Eliphalet chuckled, and went home. 

The Barnards were Marston people, a bril- 
liant but strange family; and next door to the 
Barnards lived a remarkable woman, Miss 
Persis Wayland. She was a tall handsome 
person, of a large frame. She lived to a 
great age, passing all her later life alone, save 
for one attendant, in her father's large 
house, with its gardens and hedges around 
it. She was well-to-do, and dressed with old- 
fashioned stateliness in heavy black silk. 

She was a woman of fine understanding, 
and a trained scholar. She read four Ian- 



ASSIMASQUA, AND MARSTON 179 

guages easily, and at forty took up the study 
of Hebrew, that she might have her Bible 
free from the perversions of translation. She 
was about thirty when the religious tempera- 
ment which was later to dominate her first 
manifested itself. She has told me herself 
of her experience. 

She had been conscious for years of a 
vague dissatisfaction, and of life's seeming 
empty and purposeless. She threw herself, 
first into study, then into works of charity, 
in her effort to find peace. She rose early, and 
worked till she was utterly worn out and ex- 
hausted, at her Sunday School class, at mis- 
sionary work, and till late hours at her Span- 
ish and Latin, all to no purpose. 

Then one day she found herself at a meet- 
ing at which a Methodist evangelist (she her- 
self was a strict Episcopalian) was to speak. 
She went in without thought, from a chance 
impulse as she passed the door. After the 
speaking, those who felt moved to do so were 
asked to come forward and kneel; and as she 
knelt, she felt the breath of the Spirit upon her 
forehead. 

" It was as plain as the touch of your hand 



i8o A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

and mine," she said, as she laid her handsome 
old hand on my fingers; and from that mo- 
ment, all her life, the light never left her, she 
felt " held round by an unspeakable peace and 
sunshine." 

She always held to her own church, but 
became more and more of a Spiritualist, till 
she saw her rooms constantly thronged with 
the faces of her childhood, father and mother, 
and the brothers and sisters and playmates 
who had passed on. 

She gradually withdrew from active life, 
and for the last ten years, I think, never 
stepped outside her door. She had a fine 
presence always, rapt and stately. She was 
distantly glad to see friends who called upon 
her, but never showed much human warmth. 
She lived till her ninety-eighth year. 

In the farming country near Marston began 
the ministry of Clarissa Gray, the beloved 
evangelist. An unusual experience in illness 
led this grave, charming girl to thought apart 
upon the things of God, and as she grew up, 
persons vexed in spirit began to turn to her 
for comfort. Her personality was so tranquil 
and at rest that she seemed to diffuse a sense 




-^^^ 







-^^^ 



ASSIMASQUA, AND MARSTON i8i 

of musing peace about her; yet she was not 
dreamy; her nature was rather so limpidly 
clear that she was never pre-occupied, and 
she had clear practical good-sense. Hard- 
drinking, violent men would yield to her 
direct and fearless influence. Presently she 
was asked more and more widely to lead in 
meeting, and to her unquestioning nature this 
came as a clear call. Her voice, fervent and 
pure, led in prayer, her crystal judgment 
solved problems, till without her ever know- 
ing it the community lay in the hollow of 
her small hands. 

I was last at Marston on a day of deep 
winter. We were to make a visit in the town, 
and then explore the fields and woods of the 
west slopes of Assimasqua. 

A marked change comes to us by the middle 
of January. We emerge from the softened 
twilight world of earlier winter into a bril- 
liancy of white, with bright blue shadows. 
The deep snow is changed by the action of 
the wind and its own weight, to a wonderful 
smooth firmness. It takes on carved and 
graven shapes, and might be a sublimated 
building material, a fairy alabaster or marble, 



i82 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

fit to built the palaces in the clouds. After 
each storm the snow-plough piles it, often 
above one's head, on both sides of the roads 
and sidewalks; we walk between high walls 
built of blocks and masses of blue-shadowed 
white. 

The brightness is almost too great, through 
the middle of the day; it is dazzling; but 
about sunset a curious opaque look falls on the 
landscape; a flattening, till they are like the 
hues of old pastels, of all the delicate colors. 
The country has an appearance of almost in- 
finite space, under the snow, and the wind 
carves out pure sharp wave-like curves of drift 
about the fields and hills. 

The still air, dry and fiery, is like cham- 
pagne. It almost burns, it is so cold and pure. 
A great feeling of lightness comes to moc- 
casined feet, in walking in this rarefied air 
through powdery snow; but fingers and toes 
quickly become numb without even feeling 
the cold. 

Starting early out of Marston Plains vil- 
lage, we passed a tall rounded hill which had 
a grove of maples near its top, the countless 
fine lines of their stems like the strings of 



ASSIMASQUA, AND MARSTON 183 

some harp-like instrument. The light breeze, 
hardly more than a stirring, made music 
through them. The sunrise was hidden be- 
hind this hill, but the delicate bare trees were 
lighted up as with a gold mist. 

As we entered the forest on the skirts of 
Assimasqua, the wind rose outside. A fresh 
fall of snow the day before had weighted every 
branch of the evergreens with piled-up white- 
ness, which now came down in bright 
showers, the snow crystals glinting around 
us where stray sunbeams stole down among 
the trees: but in the shelter of the great 
pines and hemlocks not a breath of wind 
reached us, and the woods were held fast in 
the snow hush, against which any chance 
sound rings out sharply. 

The bark of the different trees was like a 
set of fine etchings, the yellow birches 
shining as if burnished ; the patches of 
handsome dark mosses on the ash-trees, and 
the fine-grained bark of lindens, ashes, and 
hop-hornbeams stood out brightly. 

As we followed a wood road we heard chir- 
ruping and tweeting, and saw a flock of pine 
siskins among the pine-tops, and later we 



1 84 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

heard the vigorous tapping of a great pileated 
woodpecker. 

All the northern woodpeckers winter with 
us; as do bluejays, and chickadees, (the 
*' friendly birds " of the Indians) ; juncos and 
nuthatches; and partridges, which burrow 
under the snow for roots and berries, and are 
sometimes caught, poor things, by the foxes, 
when the crust freezes over them. Crows 
stay with us through a very mild winter, but 
more often are off to the sea, thirty miles dis- 
tant, to grow fat on periwinkles; and very 
rarely indeed a winter wren or a song- 
sparrow remains with us. The beautiful 
cream-white snow-buntings, cross-bills, fat 
handsome pine-grosbeaks, golden-crowned 
kinglets, brown-creepers, and those pirates, 
the butcher birds, come for short winter visits. 
Evening grosbeaks, and Bohemian wax-wings, 
we see more rarely. By the end of February, 
when the cold may be deepest, the great owls 
are already building, deep in the woods. 

Ever so many small sharp valleys and ravines 
were revealed among the woods, some wind- 
ing deep into the darkness of the pines and 
hemlocks. Their perfect curves were made 



ASSIMASQUA, AND MARSTON 185 

more perfect by the unbroken snow, and they 
were flecked all over with the feathery blue 
shadows of their trees. At the bottom of one 
we heard a musical tinkling, and found a 
brook partly open. We scrambled down to 
it, and knelt there, watching it, till we were 
half frozen. The ice was frosted deep with 
delicate lace-work, and looking up underneath 
we saw a perfect wonderland of organ-pipes 
and colonnades of crystal, through which the 
water tinkled melodiously. 

We came out high on the north side of 
Assimasqua, in the sugaring grove that 
spreads up the steep slope to the crest. The 
tall maples were very beautiful in their win- 
ter bareness, and th-e slope about their feet 
was massed with a close feathery growth of 
young balsam firs and hemlocks, with open- 
ings between. The snow lay even with the 
eaves of the small bark sugaring-shanty. The 
sight of a roof made the silence seem almost 
palpable, but in March the hillside will have 
plenty of sound and stir, for fires will be 
lighted and the big kettles swung, while the 
men come and go on sledges. Sugaring goes 
on all through the countryside, and even in 



1 86 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

the town boys are out with " spiles," drilling 
the maple " shade-trees," as soon as the sap 
begins running. The bright drops fall slowly, 
one by one, into the pail hung to the end of 
the spile, and the sap is like the clearest 
spring water, with a refreshing woodsy 
sweetness. 

The high rough crest of Assimasqua domi- 
nates a wide stretch of country. The long 
sweep of the fields, and the lakes, lying asleep, 
showed perfect, featureless white, as we stood 
looking down; but all about, and in among 
them, the low broken hills, the knolls and 
ridges, bore scarfs or mantles of smoke-colored 
bare woods, mixed with evergreens. 

All day the sky had been of an aquamarine 
color, of the liquid and luminous clearness 
which comes only in mid-winter, and deep 
afternoon shadows were falling as we came 
down the hillside. We were on snow-shoes, 
and had brought a toboggan, as the last part 
of our way lay down hill. The country 
was open below the sugaring grove, and 
the unbroken snow masked all the con- 
tours and mouldings of the fields, so that we 
found ourselves suddenly dropping into 



ASSIMASQUA, AND MARSTON 187 

totally unrealized hollows and skimming up 
unrealized hillocks. 

When we reached the small dome-like hill 
where we were to take the cross-country trol- 
ley, the blue-green sky had changed to a 
pure primrose, and in this, as the mar- 
velous dusk of the snow fields deepened 
about us, the thin golden sickle of the new 
moon, and then Venus, came out slowly till 
they blazed above the horizon; the primrose 
hue changed to a low band of burning orange 
beneath the fast-striding darkness, then to a 
blue-green color, a robin's egg blue, which 
showed liquid-clear behind the pines; but long 
before we reached home the colors had deep- 
ened into the peacock blue darkness of the 
winter night. 

Just before the distant whistle of the trol- 
ley broke the stillness, we had a tiny adven- 
ture; we strayed over the brow of the hill, 
and came on two baby foxes playing in the 
soft snow like kittens. 



CHAPTER XVI 
OUR TOWN 



The farms become smaller, and string along 
nearer and nearer each other, the hills slope 
more and more sharply, till suddenly, there 
below them lies our Town, held round in 
their embrace, its factory chimneys sending 
up blossoms of steam, its host of scattered 
lights at night a company of low-dropped 
stars. There is no visible boundary; but with 
the first electric light pole there is a change, 
and something deeper-rooted than its conven- 
ience and compactness, its theatres and trol- 
leys, makes the town's life as different as pos- 
sible from that of the farm districts. Yet an 
affectionate relationship maintains itself be- 
tween the two. Farm neighbors bring in a 
little area of unhurried friendliness which 
clings around their Concord wagons or pungs; 
hurrying townsfolk, stopping to greet them, 
relax their tension and an exchange of jokes 

z88 



OUR TOWN 189 

and chaff begins. Leisurely, ample farm 
women settle down in our Rest Room for 
friendly talk and laughter, and hot coffee or 
tea. 

Our dearest Town! We have perhaps some 
of the faults of all northern places. We, at 
least we women, are sad Marthas, careful and 
troubled, including house-cleaning with seed- 
time and harvest among the things ordained 
not to fail, no matter at what cost of peace of 
mind and health. We hug each our own fire- 
side; but this is because, for eight months of 
the year, the great cold gives us a habit of 
tension. We enjoy too little the elixir of 
our still winter days, and hurry, hurry as we 
go, to pop back to our warm hearths as fast 
as ever we can. 

Now and again through the year, the big 
cities call us with a Siren's voice. 

" My wife and I put in ten days at the Wal- 
dorf-Astoria each year, and we count it good 
business," says one of our tradesmen, and he 
speaks for many. The clustered brilliancy at 
the entrances of the great theatres, the shop 
windows, the sense of being carried by the 
great current of life, sets our feet and our 



190 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

pulses dancing; but I think it is not quite so 
much the stir and gaiety which we sometimes 
thirst for as the protecting insulation of the 
crowd, to draw breath in a little and let the 
mind relax. The wall that guards one's citadel 
of inner privacy needs, in a small town, to be 
built of strong stuff; it is subjected to hard 
wear. Indeed we share some of the privations 
of royalty, in that we lead our whole lives in 
the public eye. We see each other walk past 
every day, greet each other daily in shops and 
at street corners, and meet each other's good 
frocks and company manners at every church 
supper and afternoon tea. It takes a nature 
with Heaven's gift of unconsciousness to with- 
stand this wear and tear; yet there are plenty 
of these among us, people of such quality and 
fibre that they keep a fine aloofness and pri- 
vacy of life, like sanctuary gardens within 
guardian hedges. 

But if our closeness to each other has 
these slight drawbacks, it has advantages that 
are unspeakably precious. Our neighbors' 
joys and troubles are of instant importance 
to us, each and all. In the city one can look 
on while one's neighbor dies or goes bank- 



OUR TOWN 191 

rupt. Too often, one cannot help even where 
one would; here we must help, whether we 
will or no! We cannot get away from duties 
that are so imperative. Our neighbor's neces- 
sities are unescapable, and a certain soldierly 
quality comes to us in that we cannot choose. 
An instinct, whether Puritan or Quaker, 
runs straight through us, which at social 
gatherings draws men and women to the two 
sides of a room, as a magnet draws needles. 
Perhaps it is merely the shyness inherent in 
towns of small compass; in all the annals of 
small places, in Cranford, in John Gait's 
villages, the ladies bridle and simper, the 
gentlemen " begin for to bash and to blush," 
in each other's society. Whatever it is, it 
narrows and pinches communities, and does 
sometimes more far-reaching harm than the 
mere stiffening-up of parties and gatherings; 
it narrows the women's habit of thought, so 
that children are deprived of some of the wider 
outlook of citizenship ; and the woman's minis- 
try of cheering and soothing, which pours itself 
out without stint to all women in old age or 
sorrow or sickness, is too often withheld from 
the men, who may be as lonely and troubled, 



192 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

and may be left forlorn and uncheered. How- 
ever, this foolish thing vanishes before rich 
and warm natures, like snow in a March sun. 

I sometimes wish that our latch-strings 
hung a little more on the outside. It is 
easier for us to give a party, with great 
effort, and our ancestral china, than to have 
a friend drop in to share family supper; yet 
there is something that makes for strength in 
this fine privacy of each family's circle, and 
no doubt, as our social occasions are neces- 
sarily few, a certain formality is the more a 
real need. It " keeps up." 

One grave trouble runs through our com- 
munity, and leaves a black trail. Drink 
poisons the lives of too many of our working- 
men. 

The drain to the cities, which robs all small 
places of part of their life's blood, touches us 
nearly; the young wings must be tried, the 
young feet take the road. The restless sand 
is in the shoes, and one out of perhaps every 
twenty pairs sold in our street is to take a boy 
or girl out to make a new home, far from father 
and mother. 

But this, although it robs us, is also our pride 



OUR TOWN 193 

and strength. Many of the boys and girls who 
have gone out from among us have become 
torch-bearers, and their light shines back to 
us; and if the town's veins are drained, it is, 
by the very means which drain it, made part 
of the arterial system of the whole country, 
and throbs with its heart beats. The enormous 
variety of post-marks on our incoming mail 
tells its absorbing story. 

There is no sameness, even in a small town. 
Here, as everywhere, the Creator lays here 
and there His finger of difference; as if He 
said, '' Conformity is the law — and non-con- 
formity." Why should one clear-eyed boy 
among us have been born with the voice and 
vision, and the sorrow-and-reward-full conse- 
cration, of high poetry, rather than his 
brothers? Why should another, of dififerent 
bringing-up, among a din of voices crying 
down the town's possibilities, have had the 
wit and enterprise, yes, and the vision, too, to 
build up, here, a vigorous manufactory, whose 
wares, well planned and well made, now have 
their market many States away? 

I think of a third boy, the child of a well- 
read, but not a studious household, who at ten 



194 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

was laying hands on everything that he could 
find to study in the branch of science to which 
his life was later to be dedicated. He had the 
same surroundings as the rest of us, we went 
to school and played at Indians together; and 
now, for years, in a distant city, his life has led 
him daily upon voyages of thought, beyond the 
ken of those who played with him. 

Another boy, our dear naturalist, also lives 
far away. His able, merry brothers were the 
most practical creatures; so was he, too, but 
in another way. He turned, a little grave-eyed 
child, to out-of-doors, as a duck takes to water, 
caring for birds and beasts with a pure pas- 
sion, as absorbed in watching their ways as 
were the other boys in games and food. It was 
nothing to him to miss a meal, or two, if a 
turtle's eggs might be hatching. He had very 
little to help him, for his father, a very fine 
man, a master builder, failed in health early; 
but he helped himself. He found countless lit- 
tle out-of-the-way jobs; he mounted trout or 
partridges for older friends, caught bait, ex- 
changed specimens through magazines, etc., 
to keep himself out of doors, and to buy books 
and collecting materials. By the time he was 



OUR TOWN 195 

twelve he had a little taxidermy business; and 
with the growth of technical skill, the finer 
part, the naturalist's seeing eye for infinite dif- 
ference — the shading of the moth's wing, the 
marking of the wren's egg — grew faster yet; 
and with it the patient reverent absorption in 
the whole. 

People come to him now for accurate and 
delicate knowledge. His word gives the au- 
thority which for so long he sought; and, at 
least once, he has been sent by his Govern- 
ment to bring back a report of birds and fishes, 
and to plant his country's flag on a lone coral 
island. 

The other night we went to a play given by 
some of the school children. Their orchestra 
played with spirit; and from the first we grew 
absorbed in watching a little boy who played 
the bass drum. The bass drum! He played 
the snare-drum, the triangle, the cymbals, a 
set of musical rattles, and I do not know how 
many extraordinary things attached to hand 
or feet, as well. Our northern music is choked 
in the sand of over-business, prisoned by north- 
ern stiffness, but shy, stifif, awkward though it 
may be, the divine thing is there, as ground- 



196 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

water is present where there is land; and noth- 
ing can keep our children from buying (gener- 
ally with their own earnings) instruments of 
one sort or another, and picking up lessons. 

I know this little boy. His father is a la- 
borer, a slack man, down at heels, but kind and 
indulgent. The boy is a chubby little soul, 
and he accompanied the showy rag-time as 
Bach's son might have played his father's 
masses, with a serious, reverent absorption, 
his little unconscious face lighting up at any 
prettier change in the rag-time. They live in 
a tiny cottage, and are well-fed, but very un- 
tidy. As the humming bird finds honey, this 
child had somehow picked up odd pennies to 
buy, and found time to master, his extraordi- 
nary collection of instruments, and he sat play- 
ing as if in Heaven. Surely we had seen yet an- 
other manifestation of the Power, which, to- 
gether with the bright fields of golden-rod and 
daisies, plants also the hidden lily in the woods. 



II 

Of the town's politics, the less said the 
better, but in every matter outside of their 



OUR TOWN 197 

withering realm, I wonder how many other 
communities there are in which public spirit is 
as much a matter of course as drawing breath, 
where heart and soul are poured into the 
town's needs so royally. Our churches, our 
Library, our Rest Room, Board of Trade, 
and Merchants' Association have been earned 
by the hardest of hard work, shoulder to 
shoulder. Most of our women do their own 
household work, all of our men work long 
hours; but when there is question of a public 
work to be done, people will pledge, gravely 
and with their eyes open, an amount of work 
that would fairly stagger persons whose easier 
lives have trained their fibres less hardily. 
I wonder what would be the equivalent, in 
dollars and cents, of the gift to one of the 
town's undertakings, by a stalwart house- 
wife (who does all the work for a family of 
five) of every afternoon for three weeks, and 
this in December, when our Town loses its 
head in a perfect riot of Christmas present- 
giving. 

What is it in politics, what can it be, which 
so poisons human initiative at its well-springs? 
Here is public work which, we are told, we 



198 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

must accept (must we?) as a corrupting and 
corrupt thing; it deadens and poisons; and al- 
most interlocking with it is work for the same 
town's good, done by the same people, which 
invigorates as if with new breath and kindles 
a living fire among us. 

The peculiar problem of our town, the bitter, 
fighting quality of our politics, is a mystery to 
ourselves. One condition which presses 
equally hard on the whole State: the constant 
friction, and consequent moral undermining, 
of a law constantly evaded: may be in part 
responsible. But no doubt our intense, flint- 
and-steel individualism is the chief factor; yet 
this individualism is also the sap, the very 
life-blood, of the tree! 

(Surely things will be better when the ethics 
of citizenship is taught to children as un- 
equivocally as the duty of telling the truth.) 

With this citizen's work, goes on a private 
kindness so beautiful that one finds one's self 
without words, uplifted and humbled before 
it; it is as if, below the obstructions of our 
busy lives, there ran a river of friendship, so 
strong, so single-purposed, that when the 
rock above it is struck by need or adversity, 



OUR TOWN 199 

its pure current wells forth and carries every- 
thing before it. 

How many times have this or that old 
person's last days been made peaceful and 
tranquil, instead of torn with anxiety, by the 
hidden action of "a few friends": (ah, the 
fine and sweet reticence!); and these not per- 
sons of means, but of slender purses; young 
men, among others, with the new cares of 
marriage and children already heavy upon 
them. 

Doctor's bills "seen to"; a summer at the 
seashore, for a drooping young mother, 
"arranged for"; the new home cozily fur- 
nished, and books and clothing found, for a 
burnt-out household; a telephone installed, a 
year at college provided for; a girl, not at 
fault, but in trouble, taken in and made one 
of the family; these instances and their like 
crowd the town's unwritten annals. 

I must not seem to rate our deat Town too 
highly, or to claim that these examples are 
anything out of the common, that they shine 
brighter than the countless other unseen stars 
of the Milky Way of Kindness. I only stand 
abashed before a bed-rock quality of friend- 



200 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

ship, which never wears out nor tires; which 
gives and gives again, gravely, yet not count- 
ing the cost, and does not withhold that last 
sharing of hearth and privacy, before which so 
many dwellers in more sophisticated places 
cannot but waver. 

Have I given too many examples? How 
can I withhold them! 

I think of the machine-tender and his wife, 
who, in a year of ill-health and doctor's bills 
for themselves and their two children, took in 
the young wife of a fellow-worker who had 
lost his position; tended her when her baby 
came, cared for mother and child for eight 
months, till a new job was found. 

Of two households, who took in and made 
happy, the one a broken-down artist who had 
fallen on evil times in a great city, the other 
a sour-tempered old working woman, left 
without kin. The first household have grow- 
ing-up children, an automobile, horses, all 
the complexities of well-to-do life in these 
days, but the tie of old friendship was the 
one thing considered. The householders in 
the second case were not even near friends, 
merely fellow church members, a kind man 



OUR TOWN 201 

and wife, left without children, who could not 
enjoy their warm house while old Hannah 
was friendless. They tended her as they 
might have tended their own sister. 

Of the young teacher, alone in the world, 
who, when calamity came to two married 
friends (a burnt house and office, and des- 
perate illness) took all the savings that were 
to have gone for three years' special training, 
went to them, a three-days' railroad journey, 
brought them home, and bore all the house- 
hold expenses of the young couple, and of their 
baby's coming, until new work was found. 

The cooking and housework for four per- 
sons, (together with a heavy amount of neigh- 
borhood work,) would seem enough for even a 
very capable and kind pair of hands. Well, 
one friend, in addition to this, for two years 
cooked and carried in all the meals for a neigh- 
bor (a good many doors away), a crippled girl, 
a prey, heretofore, to torturing dyspepsia. 
There was no chance of saving the girl's life, 
she had a fatal complaint, but thanks to this 
simple ministry, her last two years were free 
from pain, and she was as happy a creature as 
could well be. 



202 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

These and like cases crowd to one's mind, 
till the memories of the town ring like a 
chime of bells. 

I remember how troubled we were about 
one neighbor, a gentle, sweet lady, left the 
last of a large and affectionate family circle; 
how we dreaded the loneliness for her. We 
need not have been troubled. There was a 
place for her at every hearth in the neighbor- 
hood, and when the long last illness set in, 
kind, pitiful hands of neighbors were close 
about, soothing and tending her. One 
younger friend, like a daughter, never left 
her, day after day. Her own people were 
all gone before her, her harvest was gathered, 
there could be no more anguish of parting; 
and her last years seemed, as one might say, 
carried forward on a sunny river of friendship. 

HI 

People from sunnier climates speak some- 
times of our lack of community cheer and of 
festivals; but a temperature of twenty below 
zero — or even twenty above — does not conduce 
to dancing on the green; and it may be that 



OUR TOWN 203 

the spirit's light-footedness, like that of the 
outward person, is hampered by many wrap- 
pings. Yet once in a while even we northern 
people do " break out "; as on Fourth of July, 
when, in the early morning, the " Antiques 
and Horribles," masked and painted, ride, 
grinning, through the streets. 

After a football victory, our High School 
boys, like boys everywhere, break out in un- 
organized revel. They caper about in night- 
shirts put on over their clothes, or in their 
mother's and sisters' skirts, and with the 
girls as well, they dance down the street in 
a snake-dance. They light a bonfire in the 
square, and sing, cheer, and frolic around it. 
Though they do not know it, it is pure 
carnival. 

The long white months of winter see us all 
very busy and settled. This is the time of 
year when solid reading is done, and sheets 
are hemmed, when our Literary Societies 
write and read their papers, when we get up 
plays and tableaux, and the best work is done 
in the schools. Nobody minds the long 
evenings, the lamplight beside the open fires 
is so infinitely cozy; and on moonlight nights. 



204 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

all winter, the long double-runners slip past 
outside, with joyful laughter and clatter, as 
the boys and girls — and their elders — take one 
hill after another in the Mile Coast. 

With the breaking-up of the ice, all our 
settled order breaks up, too, in the tre- 
mendous effort of Spring Cleaning. It is as 
chaotic within the house as without. The 
furniture is huddled in the middle of the 
room, swathed in sheets. The master of the 
house mourns and seeks, like a bird robbed 
of its nest. We live in aprons and sweeping 
caps, and in mock despair. The painter will 
not come; the step-ladder is broken; the 
spare-room matting is too worn to be put 
down again; but every dimmest corner of the 
attic, every picture and molding, every frag- 
ment of put-away china, is shining and pol- 
ished before the weary wives will take rest. 

With the first warm-scented May nights, 
the children's bedtime becomes an indefinite 
hour. They are all out after dusk, like 
flights of chimney-swallows. They run and 
race down the streets, they don't know why, 
and frolic like moths about the electric-light 
poles. 



OUR TOWN 205 

Memorial Day, with its grave celebration, 
renews our citizenship. The children are in 
the fields almost at sunrise, gathering scarlet 
columbines in the hill crannies, yellow dog- 
tooth violets, buttercups in the tall wet grass, 
stripping their mothers' gardens of their bril- 
liant blaze of tulips, bending down the heavy, 
dewy heads of white and purple lilacs. The 
matrons meet early at Grand Army Hall, and 
tie up and trim bouquets and baskets busily 
till noon. The talk is sober, but cheerful, and 
there is a realization of harvest-home and 
achievement, rather than sadness. The little 
sacred procession marches past, to the sound 
of music that is more elating than mournful. 
Later, after the marching, the tired men find 
hot coffee and sandwiches ready for them. 

With summer, inconsequence and irre- 
sponsibility steal happily over the town. 
Even in the shops and factories the work is 
not the same, for employers and employees 
have become easy-going, and the business 
streets look contentedly drowsy. Bricks 
and paving stones cannot keep out the wafts 
of summer fragrance, and with them an ease 
and gayety, a joie de vivre, diffuse themselves, 



2o6 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

which are astonishing after our winter sober- 
ness. Our night-lunch carts, pop-corn, and 
pink lemonade booths, with their little flaring 
lights, are ugly, if compared, for instance, to 
kindred things in Italy, but they manifest the 
same spirit. The coming of a circus shows 
this feeling at its height, but it does not need 
a circus to bring it out; and the Merry-go- 
round on one of our wharves toots its gay 
little whistle all summer. Music, sometimes 
queer and naive in expression, comes stealing 
out through the town. Our music is never 
organized, but the strains of brass or string 
quartettes or a small band, or of a little part 
singing, are heard of an evening. 

Everybody who can manage it goes down 
to the sea, if but for one day, and the small 
excursion steamer is crowded on her daily 
trips to " The Islands." 

" It takes from trade," remarks I. Scanlon, 
the teamster, *' but you've only got one life 
to live. At a time!" he adds reverently; 
and he and his wife and six children travel 
down to a much-be-cottaged island, set up 
their tent on the beach, and for a delicious, 
barefoot fortnight live on fish of their 



OUR TOWN 207 

own catching, and potatoes brought with 
them from home. 

We almost live on our lawns, and neigh- 
bors stray across to each other's piazzas for 
friendly talk, friendly silence, all through the 
warm summer evenings. 

By October every string needs tautening. 
The still, keen weather takes matters into its 
own hands, and we are brought back strictly 
to work. Meetings are held, committees ap- 
pointed, plans made for the winter's tasks, 
and soon each group is hard at it, for this and 
that missionary barrel, this and that cam- 
paign; and at Thanksgiving the matrons meet 
again at Grand Army Hall, to apportion and 
send out the Thanksgiving Dinner. It is a 
privilege to be with the kind, able women, 
to watch their capable hands, their short- 
cuts to the heart of the matter in question, 
their easy authority, their large friendliness; 
in more cases than not, their distinction of 
bearing as well. 

Thanksgiving once over, the pace quickens. 
Each church has its yearly sale and supper 
at hand, for which months of faithful work 
have been preparing, and these once worked 



2o8 A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

off, the whole town, as I have said, loses its 
head in a perfect fever of giving. What doeg 
anything matter but happiness? Christmas 
is coming! Every man, woman, and child is 
a hurrying Santa Claus. The first snow 
brings its strange hush, its strange sheltering 
pureness, and the sleigh-bells begin once more 
to jingle all about. During Christmas week 
hundreds of strings of colored lights are 
hung across the business streets. Wreaths 
and garlands of fragrant balsam fir, the very 
breath and expression of our countryside, are 
hung everywhere, over shop windows and 
doorways, in every house window, and on 
quiet mounds in the churchyard and cemetery. 
The solemnity of the great festival, which is 
our Christmas, our All Saints' and All Souls' 
in one, folds round us. 

The churches are all dark and sweet, like 
rich nests, with their heavy fir garlands, lit 
up by candles. Pews that may be scantily 
filled at most times are crowded to-night, 
for here are the boys and girls, thronging 
home from business and college. Here are 
the three tall boys of one household, whom 
we have not seen for a long time, and there 



OUR TOWN 209 

are four others. Here are girls home from 
boarding-school, rosy and sweet, blossomed 
into full maidenhood, bringing a whiff of the 
city in their furs and well-cut frocks. There 
is the only son of one family, who left home 
a stripling, now back for the first time, a 
stalwart man, with his young wife and three 
children. His little mother cannot see plainly, 
through her happy tears; and there, and there, 
and there again, are re-united households. 

The bells ring out, and after them comes 
the silver sound of the first hymn. 

Of late, on Christmas evening, the choirs 
of the different churches have begun the 
custom of meeting on the Common, to 
lead the crowd in hymns, round the town 
Christmas Tree. Later they separate and 
go about singing to different invalids and 
shut-ins, and many of the houses are 
lighted up. 

"Silent Night! Holy Night!" 

So, within doors, we neighbors meet in rev- 
erent and thankful worship; while without, 
the pure snow, the grave trees, the stars, bear 



2IO A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE 

their enduring witness to that of which they, 
and we and our human worship, are a part. 

Peace and good-will to our town, where it 
lies sheltered among its hills. The country 
rises on each side of it, and stretches peace- 
fully away to east and west. The valleys 
gather their waters, the wooded hills climb 
to the stars; they wait, guarding in silent 
bosoms the treasure of their memories, the 
secret of their hopes. 



THE NEW POETRY 



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HILLSBORO PEOPLE 

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DELIGHTFUL ANTHOLOGIES 

The following books are uniform, with full gilt flexible 
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THE GARLAND OF CHILDHOOD 

A Little Book for All Lovers of Children. Compiled by 
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for grown-ups to read. 
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THE VISTA OF ENGLISH VERSE 

Compiled by Henry S. Pancoast. 
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LETTERS THAT LIVE 

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Some 150 letters from Walter Paston to Lewis Carroll. 
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THE POETIC OLD-WORLD 

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THE POETIC NEW -WORLD 

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THE OPEN ROAD 

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Some 125 poems from over 60 authors. 
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THE FRIENDLY TOWN 

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Over 200 selections in verse and prose from 100 authors. 
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POEMS FOR TRAVELERS 

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34 Wist 330 Streit NEW YORK 



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